Notable Books by North Carolina Writers: July, 2005

Devoted Creatures, by Bill Van Every

(Dorset, Vt: Tupelo Press, 2004)

Amphibians
for Pete Turchi

Thousands hopping on the low mud bank,
and me, with a quick stick, splatting toads at leisure,
amphibious baseballs for a nine-year-old.
My first failure: getting caught hands down for killing.
The lecture was on God not needing his creations
to hurry death along.
But we do, it is in us like rust,
like God deciding when things should die
is good for Him.
Good for me that day there by the water,
flipping a toad into the air, its legs cart-wheeling
in the centrifugal spin of flight, silver-black eye
recognizing me, the stick, the swing
one split of a second.
Improved technique produced concussioned frogs
at various distances,
fat mucilaginous tongues expelled from wide mouths.
The way death does a frog is legend to a boy.
God had a good idea in helping me select, saying
This one is larger, this one fatter and slower,
easier to catch than this here sleeker one; saying
Easier to hit, but will not fly as far
high over head and into water.
Water has a way of being God.
The manner in which it shines and moves
and wears the earth down to a nub.
The way it offers up its own
from the silk of birth.
Oh but there is another God, this one radiant and loud
like the sound of solid contact between stick and frog,
or the beginning of understanding
how exact and evil one can be.
The ability to separate frog from the lobbed arc of a toss
instilled a sense of world in me.
I was alive beside that still green pond,
and perfect inside.

Bill Van Every was born in 1964, in Charlotte, N.C. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Arizona in 1994, and a Master of Fine Arts degree from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in 1997. Devoted Creatures, from which this poem is drawn, was selected by Thomas Lux for the Tupelo Press Judges Prize in Poetry in 2004. He has published poems in The Asheville Review, The Colorado Review, Interim, Sow's Ear, The Miranda Station Review,and Persona. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and his book length manuscript was a finalist for the 1998 Breadloaf/Bakeless Literary Prize and the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize sponsored by Story Line Press. He has served as a regional judge for The River of Words Project. Mr. Van Every lives with his wife, Kerry, and daughter, Stella, in the Blue Ridge mountains of western North Carolina. About Devoted Creatures the poet Tony Hoagland wrote: "There's a directness here which comes straight from the unmediated gut, and there's a spiritual ferocity, too, which cuts the psyche open and exposes the wild, aching human heart. Like a true original, Bill Van Every has devised his own poetic grammar of truth, and he speaks it with disturbing, hilarious clarity."