A Walk to the Spring House

More about the book

The poems by Sue Weaver Dunlap in A Walk to the Spring House capture memories and relics of the poet's repository of experiences in the Southern Appalachian Mountains. These old mountains and her landscape shape the sections of the book, mountains that ultimately "brace" and "root" the poet who celebrates that she "come[s]" from old. Not only does the poet "pause to praise / the storytellers" and lay claim to her "rooted inheritance," she also pays homage to her own "call to love." The poet's landscape dwells deep in the water, the mines, the mountain farm, the family, the mill town, the hollers, the ancestors-Appalachian humankind and geography-its unique voice and place. These poems stitch together love, hurt, history, beliefs, and landscape, an amazing quilt where "[she] whisper[s] the old sweet of piney roses by the door."