Home

Nancy Dillingham

Funeral

“Aunt Pallie is dead,” Daddy said.
We went to pay our respects.
“She looks like she could speak.”

I remember Uncle Jeff in a rocker
his features stone, light catching his bald head
his bony hands onionskin with large black veins.
“He won’t live long without her.”

The sun was so hot
even the plastic flowers wilted.
“Isn’t it a lovely day for a funeral?”

The angry fist in my chest
beat against my best Sunday dress.
“I love the view from here.”

I sat on the bed near the casket
and wondered where Aunt Pallie’s legs had gone.

ISBN 1-59661-138-3
49 pages/$9

Nancy Dillingham is a conscious stylist, well-read and ironic. I am in awe of her lilting lines, her use of rhymes—exact, fake (faux), and internal. I so love her poetry’s unbrutalized honesty. Somehow her poetry captures the curves and sinews, the grist and grit of her mountain heritage.
—Eston E. Roberts,
poet, novelist, philosopher

Nancy Dillingham is a mountain woman who knows her landscape and its dark places well. She can confront them, all the while singing the light and the love of place. She reads widely, she listens, she challenges herself, without losing the moorings that keep her steady as a poet and an inhabitant of these mountains.
—Kathryn Stripling Byer

Imagistic, narrative, dense as a laurel thicket, clean as the hog killer’s knife, precise as a lightning strike, these poems catch at your spirit. As a master carver removes to reveal essence, this poet pares away verbiage. The result is stellar—poems blindingly immediate as sticking tongue to frozen metal.
—Celia Miles,
author of Mattie’s Girl: an Appalachian Childhood

Nancy Dillingham’s poetry, short stories, and commentaries have appeared in a variety of literary journals, newspapers, and magazines such as the Asheville Poetry Review, Raleigh News & Observer, and Mountain Xpress. She is a sixth generation Dillingham from Big Ivy and lives in Asheville.