Jane Hicks was in third grade when Halloween inspired her to write a poem she can still quote. The most memorable line? “Something ran across the floor and someone’s knocking at the door.”
Hicks’ teacher was so impressed, she posted it on the PTA bulletin board and Hicks became a published poet.
Since that early triumph, Hicks has been winner of the Appalachian Writers Association Book of the Year Award in Poetry, with two books of poetry to her credit — “Blood and Bone Remember” and “Driving with the Dead.”
As of 2024, a new title, “The Safety of Small Things,” has been added to her publication list.
The book’s cover depicts some of the miniature marvels of the natural world, while the poems inside delve into the world of emotions associated with loss, illness, and aging. Drawing energy and hope from nature, many of the poems emerged from the poet’s diagnosis and treatment for breast cancer in 2016-17.
In “The Dark,” for instance, she encounters winter and describes its proclivity for hanging on amidst the longing for spring:
The beast of winter, still fat
on apples and meat, winds through
the trees, moans, wails, rattles
branches, calls down snow and ice …
The poet teases stark images from nature as she inhabits examination rooms and endures the ravages of chemotherapy and biopsies. Advised to keep a journal of her cancer year,
Hicks’ “Notes from a Forgotten Year” suggest that those experiences are impossible to forget.
In a guided tour of her series of surgery and treatments, she lists the magazines available to patients at her cancer center, including “Southern Living, People, “and old travel magazines/about places I didn’t want to go.”
On biopsy day, she heads home with an ice pack in her bra. After the lumpectomy when the call comes, “Margins clear!” the next step is chemo and more surgery to implant a port. Her shaved head transforms her into GI Jane, a “badass.”
When, finally, her calendar is empty of doctors, she gives thanks and moves on.
The third section of “The Safety of Small Things” delves into domestic details of past, present, and future. “Remnants of a Saving Life” memorializes the simple treasures cherished by grandparents, “hard people dulled by Depression.”
A pewter cup, cast iron skillets, a bowed yardstick give way to less practical artifacts. A china doll, a cedar chest, and a tea set “treasured for eighty years” are also prized possessions inherited from her forebears.
The book ends with, “Walking the Wilderness Road at Cumberland Gap,” evoking memories of an art work of Daniel Boone and a group of settlers venturing into “the dark and bloody ground of the Shawnee.”
The poet points out that entry to the historic trail today is marked by the modern practicality of concrete sidewalks with manufactured imprints of animal tracks and wagon wheels, substitutes for “booted prints and bare human feet” that have trod the path in the past:
trudging that road to uncharted lands, determined to pass
forest unscathed, to better places.
“The Safety of Small Things” addresses monumental challenges — cancer, chemo, surgery and its aftermath, mitigating its gravity by focusing on nature in its bounty and beauty. The opening epigraph from poet William Butler Yeats beckons readers with a promise:
The world is full of magic things,
patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.
Published by Fireside Industries, an imprint of University Press of Kentucky, reading “The Safety of Small Things” is one way to celebrate April as National Poetry Month.
Listeners to WKMS-FM in Murray can revel in poetry every day with the broadcast of Poetry Minutes, short poems written by members of the listening audience from near and far.
Constance Alexander is a columnist, award-winning poet and playwright, and President of INTEXCommunications in Murray. She is a board member for Hoptown Chronicle.
