About

Buried Land

Jim Clark was born in Byrdstown, Tennessee, midway between Music City and the Smoky Mountains; he grew up in a farm surrounded by music, where his father played the guitar and mandolin. He became a writer and a scholar, he published two books of poems, and he wrote a play. So him being a writer and a singer he published Buried Land which was combined of both songs and poems he is an associate professor of English Barton College, in Wilson, North Carolina.

Buried Land starts with a song called “ My Father, Singing”, it’s related to his own life because of him used to his father singing and him living in a house surrounded by music, so it was very inspiring. In this CD I noticed that he started of talking about his state and his parents, and that shows that he was very close to his family and his home town (the poem “In Tennessee”), where he also writes a poem about his parents wedding anniversary (the poem “The Land Under The Lake”), so it seems like that he was close to his family. The CD most of it in general talks about his home town and his family and his farm house, because in the poems or songs he talks about dinners (, anniversaries, the first time it snowed and how when the seasons occur in his home town. The mood that I analyzed from reading the lyrics, he sounds like he is missing home.

One of the poems I chose and I liked is �Return’. It is a poem about the months October, November, and December. It is really hard for me to place the speaker as one person, instead I believe the poet is referring to a particular month of the year, and the beginning of winter. The audience here is basically anybody who reads the poem, talking about the weather is not limited to certain people, so the audience is anybody who might be affected by the change in weather. The title is significant because it summarizes what the whole poem is about in one word; return.

This poem is divided to three stanzas. The first stanza is about October and a description of what it is like, to draw attention to what the poem is going to be about. The second stanza refers to the speaker and the winter. The third stanza refers to the speaker as the month of November because of the statement of pilgrims.

The key word in the first stanza has to be the month of October, it sets up the whole mode of the poem. “I” in the third stanza refers to the month of November and is equally important in implication to the winter and the months of the year.

The next poem I chose is �Learning How to Live’, in this poem the speaker is not stated but implied to be a homeless person and the audience in general is anybody who reads the poem. The title “Learning How to Live” has many implications about the poem. After one reads the poem and relates to the title, the general concept might be that learning how to live right is to learn how to let go of material things in life (implied as the coat) and