A Post-pastoral Reading of Ron Rash’s “Speckled Trout”

Although popularly known for his novels The World Made Straight (2006) and Serena (2008), Ron Rash has also committed himself to an unapologetic portrayal of the rural history and shifting cultures of Southern Appalachia through his poetry. His poems map the dramatic transformation of an agrarian landscape in the wake of industrial and post-industrial development. His first volume, Eureka Mill (1998), charts the Appalachian outmigration of the early twentieth century, honoring the experience of displacement and impoverishment as farmers reluctantly abandoned their roots in the mountain soil to seek work in the exploitative textile mills of Chester County, South Carolina. His second and third volumes, Among the Believers (2000) and Raising the Dead (2002), extend Rash’s engagement with the passing of an agricultural-based livelihood that had sustained individual families and a region for generations. In Among the Believers, the natural world embodies a religious experience in the Emersonian sense, nature figured as a divine language, “graced with a cadence so pure/ears deaf a lifetime now heard.”1 In the more elegiac Raising the Dead, the poet combats cultural erasure, shifting his attention to the 1973 flooding of Jocassee Valley by Duke Power Company— unearthing the stories, customs, and myths of the displaced townsfolk whose ancestral farms, churches, and gravesites were submerged beneath the manmade body of water (Lake Jocassee). In every volume to date, including his most recent collection, Waking (2011), which is his most personal, Rash expresses a sense of attachment to and rootedness in the rural landscape, while detailing its material and social transformation. Indeed, an intimacy with more-than-human-nature is arguably what structures Rash’s entire poetic corpus. British ecocritic Terry Gifford has spent decades conceptualizing the “post-pastoral,” which places environmental concerns at the center, not the periphery, of the pastoral tradition. Gifford asserts that the “post-pastoral” does not https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.1965519