Review by Tyler R. Tichelaar
Kathleen M. Heideman’s poetry collection The Caving Grounds is almost impossible to describe. You must experience it for yourself to fully understand the riches to be mined from it, but I will try to give a flavor of it. Imagine placing an iron ore pellet you have found beside a railroad track in your mouth and rolling it around so your tongue feels the texture of every curve. Then digest it, let is stick inside you, slowly working its way through until it becomes part of you. Then go live in Negaunee for a century and a half, let your house be covered with red dust, and dig up your ancestors and move them across a railroad track so you can mine beneath them. Do all that, and you might get some sense of the original experience that awaits you upon reading this book.
Unfortunately, few of us can or will do all that. And those of us not from Negaunee can only try to understand the full context of what this book conveys. Fortunately, Kathleen lets us know upfront what is important to know. She gives us a prefatory quiz with blanks to fill in (and answers below) so we get the major facts like how Chief Maji-gesik helped the white men discover the iron ore in the first place, and geological details. As the book continues, we learn how a cemetery was really moved so it could be mined beneath, how so many mines were dug beneath the town that fear rose that people’s houses would sink in, leaving to homes being moved, the caving grounds roped off, and now in recent years, them being reopened.
Heideman also introduces us to Rusty, who becomes our guide, but he is like no other tour guide. Yes, he’ll give us a walking tour of the caving grounds. But he’s a mythical being, as metaphorically big in regards to mining as Paul Bunyan is to logging. As timeless as Merlin, he is able to disappear and return at will. Sometimes it seems the iron ore might be finally exhausted so he leaves, but who’s to say the ore is all gone—we can always look for more, and then Rusty might return. Sometimes Rusty’s seated on a barstool waiting to give the next tour, sometimes he’s running the widowmaker or using a pickax in the 1850s.
History lessons abound in the poems, but the presentation of that history is often Joycean, words often needed to be mined to find all their multiple meanings. In fact, I was astonished by how much effort Heideman must have put into choosing each word, and how effortlessly the sentences flow. The wordplay is delightful, the lightness of tone alternating with the somberness of the Barnes-Hecker disaster, until the almost Blakean and absurdist poems that mark the end. As a first-time reader, I know only mined the surface of this treasure trove, and deeper treasures await me upon successive readings.
The wordplay and subtle references to UP history, historians, and major works of literature all deserve to be remarked upon, so let me give a few examples.
Literary references: The opening poem depicts the narrator in the Delft Theater watching a silent film about mining in the UP. When finished, the projectionist plays it backward so they can watch everything slowly return to the mine, the mines then be filled in, and replaced with the virgin earth—a scene similar to that of the reverse bombing of Dresden in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five. Another poem, “Miracle in the Museum of Iron Industry” is a play on W. H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts” with an opening line “about rusting they were never wrong,/our deep-shaft miners” that echoes Auden’s opening line, “about suffering they were never wrong, the old masters.”
Wordplay: In one poem, a miner refers to the mines as “girls” and says he’s had his way with every one of them. He wouldn’t object to sleeping with you someday, either, “if you ever caved.” Another poem discusses an ad from the bank about how it is a good place to start saving, but bankers don’t seem to understand that miners see “deposits” and only think about how to make “withdraw” them.
History: Another poem references an old stone tablet that may or may not be a hoax about how the Phoenicians came to the UP for copper. Heideman is the daughter-in-law of UP Historian Fred Rydholm, who wrote Michigan Copper about the possibilities that ancients cultures came to the UP to mine copper. In other places she quotes mining reports, residents of the caving grounds, and provides the endnotes to reference it all.
Like the Negaunee librarian depicted in one of the poems who reads Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, knows it by heart, and always finds a new detail, “a rusty nail to snag her heart,” the reader who immerses themselves into this mix of myth, magic, and mining will find much to excavate and treasure. There are diamonds and rubies throughout the verses, but at the book’s heart is hematite. I think it’s safe to say Heideman’s poetic voice is as strong as iron with no sign of rusting anytime soon. Let England have its Beowulf, France its Song of Roland, and Finland its Kalevala. Now Negaunee has The Caving Grounds.
The Caving Grounds
By Kathleen M. Heideman
ISBN: 979-1-61599-845-6
Modern History Press
Release date 2025, paperback
