The Tillable Land - by Melva Sue Priddy (Paperback)

About the Book

"The Tillable Land is a heart-racing, heart-breaking lyric, a liberating coming of age for our stunted relationship to all that feeds us."-Rebecca Gayle Howell

Book Synopsis

"The Tillable Land is a heart-racing, heart-breaking lyric, a liberating coming of age for our stunted relationship to all that feeds us."-Rebecca Gayle Howell, Author of American Purgatory and Render/An Apocalypse and Poetry Editor, Oxford American

In The Tillable Land, Melva Sue Priddy's poetry tells the story of a girlhood made of both land and family in midcentury Kentucky. There is a growing up and a coming of age in these poems. Part memoir-in-verse, part praise song, The Tillable Land-through the story of one woman's hard-won Kentucky life and the physical and emotional work of growing up close to the land in a man's world-reminds us that it is possible to be both a farmer and a woman and that healing can be found in both the earth and the power of Mother Nature within us. "Priddy makes brilliant use of the repetitive, braiding form of the villanelle to convey the relentless cycles of farm work. But somehow, amid this punishing labor, 'another god spoke with [her] . . . and words songed through [her] veins'. She never let go of that singing, and now she offers it to us." George Ella Lyon, Kentucky Poet Laureate, 2015-2016, author of Back to the Light

" Priddy's The Tillable Land is a double helix of a book. One strand is a story about a family's life-dairy farming and growing tobacco, and also food for the table-beginning with an initial purchase of an unforgiving seventy-acre plot of land that had been deemed untillable. The other strand concerns the oldest daughter who, from a very young age, bears onerous responsibilities both inside and outside a house ruled by a father who believes that children-and women-should be seen and not heard. Because she 'could not be silent' as she matures, her life is marked by the 'tingling numbness' of this past. Robert Frost's 'The land was ours before we were the land's' is a line that maps the trajectory of Melva Sue Priddy's teeming book. This book, often not pretty, formally enacts a winding, unwinding, rewinding journey that leads one woman, buttressed by smarts and beauty, to salvage from memory a place written into her DNA."-Debra Kang Dean, author of Totem: America

"'The farm raged with run-down fences, ' Priddy tells us early on in The Tillable Land, and 'the family had no such boundaries.' The poet sets those boundaries now, by chronicling a childhood where her father required his small children to do work they had neither the size nor strength to perform. Priddy makes brilliant use of the repetitive, braiding form of the villanelle to convey the relentless cycles of farm work. But somehow, amid this punishing labor, 'another god spoke with [her] and words warm songed through [her] veins.' She never let go of that singing, and now she offers it to us. "-George Ella Lyon, Kentucky Poet Laureate, 2015-2016, author of Back to the Light

Review Quotes

"Priddy's teeming book, The Tillable Land, often not pretty, formally enacts a winding, unwinding, rewinding journey that leads one woman, buttressed by smarts and beauty, to salvage from memory a place written into her DNA.-Debra Kang Dean

"The Tillable Land by Melva Sue Priddy is one of the truest books I know. These poems are spoken from 'deep inside / my own bones' heart, where no one could touch me.' They speak to that heart's hard road of becoming, of saving itself by naming and refusing what must be refused and-just as importantly-by loving what can still be loved. Alongside the witnessing of cruelty and its injuries are praise poems to some of the most common matter of the earth and to the surviving beauties of human life here. 'When young, I thought trees waved and made the wind, ' Priddy tells us, and later on, 'Sweet scented straw, in my garden I scatter you. / You are harvested music falling from my fingertips.' Also, always, earth falling away from under our feet, 'the new sinkholes' we never see coming. This voice does not falter in the face of a hard road. In these poems, Melva Sue Priddy shares a way, for each of us with ears to hear, to live and speak the truths of our own 'bones' heart.'"-Diane Gilliam

"'The farm raged with run-down fences, ' Melva Sue Priddy tells us early on in The Tillable Land, and 'the family had no such boundaries.' The poet sets those boundaries now, by chronicling a childhood where her father required his small children to do work they had neither the size nor strength to perform....She lived on 'land that god clothed / with rocks' where '[s]ome of those rocks [were her] bones.' Priddy makes brilliant use of the repetitive, braiding form of the villanelle to convey the relentless cycles of farm work. But somehow, amid this punishing labor, 'another god spoke with [her]...and words warm songed through [her] veins.' She never let go of that singing, and now she offers it to us." -George Ella Lyon

"This hard-won book of poetry portrays a family determined to beat a living out of the land-without realizing they belong to it. There is little comfort and there are very few moments even of calm in this hardscrabble farm life, a blunt reality these poems note, yet the speaker of these words so clearly longed for affection. What got left out? What in the speaker's recollection of her childhood was misguided or poorly handled? In The Tillable Land, the poet's answer is heavily shaded with ambiguity. Growing up and coming of age in these poems requires a tug in two directions at once-the desire to flee and the desire to hold on have held equal sway. It is a powerful double bond and makes the poet's response all the more poignant."

-Maurice Manning

"Melva Sue Priddy is that rare twenty-first-century poet whose lines both vault and crawl from the earth-and that means the muck and manure of farming-in her remarkable debut volume, The Tillable Land. Here, she sets the environmental clock ticking by plunging her readers into the contradictions of herding milk cows and harvesting tobacco-the narrowest of choices on the slimmest of margins. Priddy portrays the visceral realities of cows in their stanchions, of girlhood, of a farmer-father's threats and violence, and of women's bone-tiring labor. In other poems, she displays a deep, rewarding knowledge of growth and gardens. Her harrowing poems give profound meaning to the phrase 'dirt poor.' I read them all in awe of Priddy's clear-eyed understanding-not to mention the subtle craft that always underpins her powerful illuminations."-Molly Peacock