Gov. Mike Easley had the power to appoint the new laureate, but rather than make an uninformed selection, he consulted with the N.C. Arts Council, the N.C. Poetry Society, the N.C. Writers’ Network, and a committee of writers who made a final recommendation. Those who had a stake in the appointment were ready to make themselves heard if the announcement didn’t please them.
Easley’s appointment of Kathryn Stripling Byer, the award-winning poet who teaches at Western Carolina University, didn’t bring an acerbic twitter from the poetry community. Every scribbler in the state knew there was no better choice.
But if there were any doubts, Byer’s new collection, “Coming to Rest” (Louisiana State University Press. 72 pages. $16.95) surely dispels them. The collection of 36 poems demonstrates grace and complexity, and transcends the excellent work in her previous volumes, “Wake,” “Catching Light,” “Black Shawl,” “Wildwood Flower,” and “The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest.”
An intensely private poet who sprinkled her earlier poems, much of it strongly lyric, with personal allusions, Byer’s new poems, even when couched in traditional and obscure forms, are for the most part narrative. And Byer has only sharpened her gift for integrating folk and popular culture in a crazy quilt of images and language patterns.
In brief, there’s not a clunker in “Coming to Rest.” Byer has expanded the inclusiveness of her subject matter, and her desire to broaden the parlance of poetry results in poems that are honest, playful, and completely satisfying.
Her poem, “The Exotics,” is dedicated to her graduate school professor and mentor Robert Watson. Demonstrating the skills of a truly mature poet, Byer conveys the complexity of her experience in the UNC-Greensboro MFA program in the late ’60s, a subject I had long believed impossible to capture with any degree of clarity or comic anguish.
“…We passed our new poems
round the table and waited to read aloud,
palms sweaty, tongues dry from suddenly doubting
that anything inside the dark of our voices could sing
worth Bob’s listening….”
The tension in those long-ago workshops is rendered with sweet sentiment that’s never cloying. Remembering, 40 years later, her classmates’ poems, their promise and pretension, Byers writes:
“…And Rick’s ‘Soledades: O Luminous
Afternoon,’ when with the fanfare of hyacinths, Pat levitated
her dead grandpa’s flimsy fedora! The odor of hyacinths
that April I’m not ashamed to say followed me
everywhere, promising more poems than I believed
possible….”
Even my old friend Joel Jackson, author of “News, Weather and Sports,” comes alive when he extinguishes a fire started in a metaphoric trashcan full of “rough drafts poems.”
“So Joel extinguished the first nip
of flame with his breath and swore he would write
poems that burned clean through the page,
as if nobody knew he was falling in love with the air
itself teasing him into her circles
within circles till he was so dizzy
he could see stars in the smallest reflection
of night in his black Chevy’s rear mirror.
That April, King was gunned down
and the city shut tight in its curfews at sunset,
we walked every afternoon roundabout Spring Garden,
looking for poems we could bring back to Bob,…”
Byer does what every poet wishes to do: she reassembles the past into a manageable present — and she does so with a sweet, unsentimental directness.
“Coming to Rest” is Byer’s best book, and her continuing growth of a poet will no doubt earn for her the greater recognition she deserves.
Stephen Smith can be reached at travisses@hotmail.com.
