Table of Contents

LOIS SMITH HIERS 

One woman's story is the word I write,
And no invention, or the page is clear...
She rises early, eager as the light
To tend her garden, setting rose-roots where
The world goes by, then leans upon her hoe
In languorous daydream...

--Lois Smith Hiers

The name Lois Smith Hiers is not a familiar one to most Pike Countians, even to those who profess an interest in the literature of their own region.  Anthologists and historians whose job is to preserve the stories, poems and biographies of our best authors have all but ignored one of the strongest voices in twentieth- century Kentucky literature.  

Sadly, information on Hiers’ life and work is limited to sketchy  public records and the single out-of-print book she left us.  

Lois Smith Hiers was born February 26, 1910 in Canada, Kentucky, a small Pike County community where she would spend the entirety of her long life.  The second child of Orison and Fanny West Smith, she had one older sister, two younger sisters and a brother, all of whom she would outlive.  Lois attended local schools and enrolled in Pikeville College Academy in 1925.  She was an honor roll student, a reporter for the college newspaper The Record and served as vice president of her senior class. In 1927 she graduated  with the school’s highest academic honor.  The staff of the college yearbook, The Highlander, remembered Lois Smith with these words: 

“Lois is the intellectual giant of our class.  She has made the honor roll the last three years and is an expert in Latin.  Her smile would captivate any young man and she has a disposition approaching perfection.” 

Although the date is not available, Lois married Wade Hampton Hiers, a Canada native who worked as a District Supervisor for the Kentucky Highway Department.  They had one son, Jonathan Wade, who attended Ohio State University.  Mrs. Hiers served as postmaster at Canada from 1945 to 1950. 

It is not certain when Lois began writing poetry, but she was in her mid-forties when she started gaining national exposure with poems appearing in such well-known periodicals as The Lyric, Voices, Wing: a Quarterly of Verse and Westminster Magazine.  As early as 1954 a poem published in Kaleiodograph: a National Magazine of Poetry won the prestigious Reynolds Lyric Award, with a cash honorarium of two hundred dollars.  She encored two years later with the Norfolk Prize of the Poetry Society of Virginia.  It was followed in 1958 by the Leonora Speyer Memorial Award, named for the Pulitzer Prize winning American poet and violinist.  

The crowning achievement of this fecund period was the publication of My House and My Country: A First Book of Poems. Hiers was forty eight when it was released October 1,1958 by The Fine Editions Press of New York.  This sky blue hardback containing forty nine of her best poems is dedicated “To those I love, this side of sleep and beyond.”   

The publisher’s dust jacket blurb, although laudatory, only hints at the significance of the collection:  “It will be clear, by turning to any poem included in this collection, that Mrs. Hiers is a scrupulous craftsman, unfailing in felicity of expression and economy of phrase.  Under the surface of a disciplined imagery flows a delicate ardor, never obtrusive yet ever present and implicative.  It is a song that is both original and distinguished.” 

Unlike many of her contemporaries who hailed from Eastern Kentucky, Lois Smith Hiers can hardly be classified as a local colorist or Appalachian writer, labels that tend to limit and stereotype the more deserving author.  Her native hills “of bird- world and wood,” of “bramble and vine” serve as a backdrop or matrix for themes that are both personal and universal.  

In “Conversation With Myself,” the first poem in Hiers’ book, the poet shocks us with the lines:  “If joy be the first to fall, and grief be last/ Thought, shake a dilly down and break my fast.”  It seems paradoxical, if not improbable, that she would forfeit joy for grief, until we realize that in the midst of sorrow, “when the fruit of years swings mellow in the mind,” one’s joy in retrospect brings comfort and healing.  “O joy, be first to fall that I may find/Lost laughter, flowering on the edge of shadow.”  It is the same truism that Shakespeare spoke in Love’s Labour’s Lost:    “Affliction may one day smile again, and till then, sit thee down sorrow!”

In “On Laying Up Treasure” we find a variation on the same theme, but with a certain smugness on the part of one who has wisely reaped the fullness of the past and faces both an earthly future and the hereafter better prepared than most:  

All have not wisdom. All have laid by for 
  tomorrow
No certain sweetness, nought for a shield but the 
  shape
Of the beggared bough, the white of remembered 
  sorrow;
In a season of snow, they shall batter my door to 
  borrow
A sip of my wild sweet grape.

In “November-Down,” we find the poet at her most reverent,  watching an early winter storm in which the skies drop birds “wing by wing.”   She addresses a “good father,” a parent whose  

benevolence  transcends the realm of an earthy paterfamilias,   calling his children to “a feast of love.”:

Good father, we think you real and true, this night
of our November...
More deathless than spilled moonlight...

In “Woman Remembering” flown birds symbolize missed opportunities in the poet’s life, “fallen wings for which I now atone.” At last she accepts the irretrievability of Time: 

I stood with open hands and let them go
Uncounted and unblessed...
To peck at shrivelled sweets, and quarrel, and clutch
At Time, unclappered as a rusty bell.

The title poem “My House and My Country,” is probably the poet’s most ambitious.  With knowledge that comes with age, “Now that frost hoars my head,” the poet tackles the existential question of man’s place and purpose in the universe, challenging anyone to “say of my flesh, it is dust, /or of my mind, it is myth?”  She is an “all-brothered,” yet single creature, crawling from ancient waters.  Like Whitman, in “Song of Myself,” she becomes one with self and nature, one with Adam and one with Eve, a “child flying from fruit to flower.”  “Through waters, tempests, and the terrible dark” she has evolved, “grown tall,” and is able to “fashion bricks for the building of cities.”  Finally, like the man who desires to return to the womb, she longs for a “never-lost, never-quite-found garden…called Eden.”   She comes to realize that her slow walk through the “Orchards of Time” has ended at her doorstep:

I am Life, the world's one citizen:
Let wind take the field...
Let dust lie over the sun..
Here is my house and my country.
Here I abide.

Unfortunately, My House and My Country was Hiers’ only book,  although she would continue to publish her prize-winning poetry well into the 1960s.  During this period her poems appeared in several regional journals and anthologies, including Twigs, Kentucky Writing and Contemporary Kentucky Poetry.  In 1965 she won the Poetry Society of America Award with her poem “China Bound.”  She was listed in both International Who’s Who in Poetry and Who’s Who in America.   Lois Smith Hiers died December 21, 2006 at the age of 96.  It is conceivable that a poet in her fifties, at the peak of her powers, was not finished.  

With exceptions such as “My House and My Country,” Hiers wrote most of her poems in traditional rhymed verse, a medium often viewed by today’s standards as contrived and archaic.    Her skillful use of alliteration, difficult rhyme schemes and other devices only enhanced the beauty and power of her poems.  

One should not have to search dusty archives and out-of-print anthologies to find the work of Lois Smith Hiers.  Given her talents, we are sure it was no fault of hers, but the “blindness” of editors,  critics, and even readers that aborted her career and denied her a rightful place among the greats.  In the final stanza of “Recognition of Loss” she is painfully aware of such injustice:   

This is our sorrow, that our eyes are blind
From too much seeing, blind and blank they stare
In tearless welcome; this, our woe, to find
The green flood faithful still, and no more care
That joy lies beached and broken in the mind.

Might these words stand as an affirmation of her loss–and ours. 

Contributor – Gayle Compton

CONVERSATION WITH MYSELF

I

If joy be first to fall, and grief be last,--
Thought, shake me down a dilly of a day,
Complete with bloom and bells.  Come, think away
This meadow, dull and dun, that overcast 
Of cloud that moods the sky, and, moving past,
Leaves shadow in its wake, and wings with grey
The once-bright birds that flocked the fields of May.
Thought, shake a dilly down, and break my fast.

The fruit of years swings mellow in the mind:
Back...and forth...a hill, a daisy meadow,
Where laughing children run headlong to dark...
O joy, be first to fall, that I may find
Lost laughter, flowering on the edge of shadow;
Green hills...and daisies...and the singing lark.

II

A life, true-colored, is a dappled thing
Of fair and falling weather.  Now that I ponder
My personal sky, its blue, its sudden thunder,
I look for bright and dark in every wing
That homeward flies...a dappled bird will sing
Of dawn and dusk, and grief will wed me under
The troth I pledge with joy.  Am I, then, fonder 
Of light than dark, when, touching dark, I cling?

When all my years go winging off, and sky
Reverts to birdless blue, and bones are dust,--
Some time, or where, or death-enduring place,
A dawn will crow me up; old ilk of I,
With grief, that languid lover, on my breast,
And joy, fresh and freckled, on my face.

From My House and My Country

AFFIRMATION BY MOONLIGHT

Dear Diary, and may the moon my witness
Be to late truth-telling, I praise the bright
Meridian hour; all else is blackest fiction.

One woman's story is the word I write,
And no invention, or the page is clear...
She rises early, eager as the light

To tend her garden, setting rose-roots where
The world goes by, then leans upon her hoe
In languorous daydream, April is so fair.

She cautions bulbs:  Be lilies, be a row
Of bluebells, be yet again, God willing, yet
Again renascent; my lovelies, live and grow

Taller than grief, and wider than regret.
Tomorrow's bloom is what a woman gathers
Around her, from earth, from sky, in nets

Of simple cunning.  April is growing weather,
She tells a mocking bird...wherefore, this flight
Of home-grown words, and moon be witness 
   whether

The tale is true.  Dear Book, I say good-night
In hope of roses...humbly, I praise the light.

From My House and My Country 

AND THEN THERE WERE NINE

Suddenly, the hill would have no more of the
     doves--
Already so beetled, birded, and singing at every
     hatch
With day hardly hollowed, one dove was a coo too
     much--
So the hill flung the flock of them out, as a wind-
     sally heaves

A flutter of snowflakes.  Wing free, after the worst
Of their panic abated, they gave themselves wholly
     to air
Like fish to the fathering sea:  O, were fanciful
     there,
Dipping and gliding, as if they were truly the first,

Since the floods flowed away, to break the blue
     dream of sky--
(The clouds abetted them, wider- winged, whiter,
     they fled),
And air, neither sky neither sea, was bird-world 
     and wood.
Voyages later, they left off their high jinks to try

The trick of wire-walking: dainty and dovey-
     demure,
Like self-confirmed saints, they tested the strait and
     narrow:
Feasible, yes, but dull.  Then, swifter than arrow,
They flew the original coop, and lowered sail where

Their odyssey-forth began:  which nothing much
     proves,
Except that a wing is a bird is a flock is a cloud,--
Except that a hill, no matter how brimming with
     brood,
Is nine times better for doves!

From  Deep Summer: Kentucky Writing  1963

TIME ENOUGH FOR EAGLES

I arrive where the houses sit aslant
A tall tilt of earth,
And each man's kingdom is an eyrie
Safe and sure as the sturdy stone cobbling
The breakneck flight of streets
Out of noise to nowhere.
So, enter a narrow way marked Welcome
And stand, at last, on the very peak and perch
Of a hush-hush haven for old brides
And birds.

Below me, the city winks its come-on eyes,
And the crosscross beams of alley and avenue,
Like winds, enticingly strange,
Pull at my mind's folded wings.

Acknowledging the wilderness in me,
I am absolved...
A retired bird, harbored high above
The nocturnal quests
Of bats, whippoorwills, small owls, and sundry,
I am content to sit in churchly calm,
Non-participant,
Nevertheless in tune with
The repetitious chitchat and wing speech
Of chimney swift and sparrow. 

Yonder, a wheeling world
Irrevocably waits...
World of swoop-swerve, twist-turn, fight-flight, 
And heaven help all fledglings, phony cocks
And foolish doves...

Tomorrow is time enough for eagles.

From My House and My Country 

MY HOUSE AND MY COUNTRY

Now that frost hoars my head,
And the fever in my veins slows with Winter,--
Now that my flesh forsakes the fire,
And huddles for warmth,
At the empty hearth of another's love,--
Now that I welcome the wind,
And, in my silent moods, consider the snow,--
I shuffle from mood to thought,
From thought to knowledge,
From knowledge to knowing,
From knowing to being...
Worlds are many and one;
The flocked sky is my green pasture,
And I fold where I lie down.
Who, under heaven, can name me,
Or say of my flesh, It is dust,
Or of my mind, It is myth?
Being all-brothered, yet one
Is my self, and the same that I was,
I am.

Always, this essence,
Rooted in some unreachable place...
Before the stars were born,
Or suns, or pale, sibling moons,
Or earths to their orbits bound,
I felt in my tree the sap of their living fire:
My boughs exploded with fruit,
My branches weighted the sky...
One blew a big wind, and my seed
Flared from within, and fell
Eternally circling.

I hung in the caul of mist
That swaddled the earth's conceiving;
I fell with an endless rain,
And my fostering flowered the sea;
I was monad, mollusk, serpent and shark;
I was whale, great leviathan,
His giant impotence, mine. . . 
And mine, the minutest mite
That slept on the sea's dark floor.
I was the wingless wish, the legless yearn;
The lure and the leap, the coax and the comer.
When the waters fell from the hills
After the eons of oceans,
When the floods flowed away
And beached my beginnings to crawl
With the fumbling slowness of snails,--
The fire in me loved the light,
And forged, from that love, an eye:
I was the first to look, reach, stand, walk;
The first of the flood's hatch to fly.

Adam, One called me, Adam. . .
A dream pricked me awake, and I was a child,
Flying from fruit to flower, tentative, touching,--
From tree to vine to tree,
Orange, pomegranate, fig, apple,--
For me, the grape swelled,
And the rose dripped blood-red petals down;
I was nectar and dew,
The honey that beckoned the bee;
I was the bumbling bee,
Bodied with sun and winged with summery sound;
I was the ripening fruit, the reaching hand;
The tongue, the hand and the eye.

I was the woman, Eve.
A dove sat on my head,
And my hands hankered for stars.
I was Eve, and I walked with grace
Through orchards of Time;
On every tree, there were apples;
In every time, serpents. 

Measure me, I have grown tall:
I fashion bricks for the building of cities,
And span the earth with my imaginings;
My mind festers with caged fires
That balloon into bombs:
I give to great flame my towering towns;
Yet I harken always to the hosts 
Of my happy children.

I live in jungles, and my skin is black;
I set my house on the slopes of golden hills,
And my flesh is as warm as my heart;
I climb the high mountain, caped
And hooded with snow,
And the sky looks out of my eyes;
My thought, muddied with blood and death,
Heaves at the white walls of heaven.

Now that the frost hoars my head,
And the wine in my wineskin darkens with cold,--
Now that I suffer the wind like a leaf,
And, like a blown leaf, fall with somber sighing
I retrace my wandering steps,
Up earth and down sky,
Through waters, tempests, and the terrible dark,
To that never-lost, never quite-quite-found
Garden and Somewhere,
Called Eden. . . 

I am Life, the world's one citizen: 
Though I sleep, I wake;
And though I die, I live.
Let wind take the field,
Let the pasture burn,
Let dust lie over the sun
And the flocking stars be scattered,
Here is my fold.
Here is my house and my country. 
Here I abide.

From My House and My Country

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