The Land We Dreamed: Poems

Kentucky Voices

by Joe Survant

Weaving together universal themes of family, geography, and death with images of America's frontier landscape, former Kentucky Poet Laureate Joe Survant has been lauded for his ability to capture the spirit of the land and its people. Kliatt magazine has praised his work, stating, "Survant's words sing. . . . This is storytelling at its best."

Exploring the pre-Columbian and frontier history of the commonwealth, The Land We Dreamed is the final installment in the poet's trilogy on rural Kentucky. The poems in the book feature several well-known figures and their stories, reimagining Dr. Thomas Walker's naming of the Cumberland Plateau, Mary Draper Ingles's treacherous journey from Big Bone Lick to western Virginia following her abduction by Native Americans, and Daniel Boone's ruminations on the fall season of 1770. Survant also explores the Bluegrass from the perspectives of the chiefs of the Shawnee and Seneca tribes.

Drawing on primary documents such as the seventeenth-century reports of French Jesuit missionaries, excerpts from the Draper manuscripts, and the journals of pioneers George Croghan and Christopher Gist, this collection surveys a broad and under-recorded history. Poem by poem, Survant takes readers on an imaginative expedition―through unspoiled Shawnee cornfields, down the wild Ohio River, and into the depths of the region's ancient coal seams.

Genres: History

148 pages, Paperback

First published April 3, 2014

Reviews

[Sherry Chandler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wild grapevines overrun this
place. They cling all around
to chestnut, oak and gum
binding them to the ground.
I cannot see past
the awful complication of
their tangled branches.

This passage might do to sum up the whole troubled history of the state of Kentucky.

The Land We Dreamed is the final book in Joe Survant's trilogy on that history. This volume begins in the pre-Columbean period and ends in European settlement and statehood. As I did in my own treatment of the subject, Weaving a New Eden, Joe mixes the famous with the obscure, the obscure being his own forebears -- and some fictional characters.

The result, as Maurice Manning says in his cover blurb, is a patchwork sewn into whole cloth. Patchwork is a conservative art, a re-purposing of cloth. Its artistry is to make the patchwork more attractive than the whole cloth.

Joe's voice is one of quiet authority. He can lead a reader into the most atrocious circumstances without raising his voice, as in the quotation above, from the poem "Alone." The quiet tone gives balance to the violence and terror of the clash of cultures. Plenty of action in this book, as reflected by a selection of first lines:

At the first shot we

Bloody hands again

Huddled in this hollow tree

They killed my children

The Hiroquois barely tolerate me

Heat like a hammer hits,

To read this book is a bit like being the third horse soldier on the right, following John Wayne into Hostile territory, forgive my anachronism.

Lest I give the impression that these poems are all shoot 'em ups, let me hasten to add that there are also moments of great poignancy. "Mingo Bottom," for example, is an elegy for what was lost in the gaining of a continent. Spoken by Archibald Magruder in 1792, the year Kentucky became the 15th state in the union, the poem considers the buffalo:

When we came
into the country
in '88, the
buffalo were gone.
I never saw one alive.
Slaughtered . . .

Their roads at
Blue Lick were
40 yards wide,
and the Indians
who hunted them
lived in Mingo Bottom
prairie then, cornland
now.

The Land We Dreamed addresses the complexities of culture clash, when one people's dream is another people's nightmare. We all know how it came out.

[channel alli · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Land We Dreamed paints a beautiful, raw, and compelling picture of Kentucky before the 19th century. It incorporates history and imagination, effortlessly jumping from perspective to perspective.

It's sometimes hard for me to engage with poetry, but I thoroughly enjoyed Survant's writing. Though it's a short read, it's well worth spending hours poring over the text. Little references and details pop out in subsequent reads; it is deeply enriched by the practice of annotation.

[Mina Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this book discovers a theme of empathy within all sides of colonialism that expressed through poems. This book is so important and empathetic to Kentucky history and does a really good job of applying sadness to each of the communities struggling through this period of history

[caroline wright · Rating 3 out of 5]

Whip-smart.