Notable Books by North Carolina Writers: March, 2006

An invitation. . .
How many times have I heard the saying, "Throw a rock (or whatever else comes to mind, something nonviolent, I hope) in North Carolina and you'll hit a writer!" Well, throw a lariat, as I like to think I'm doing, and you'll pull in some books worth adding to your collection, your nightstand, your life.

I hope this "book of the month" feature does just that: reels in some books by North Carolina writers, most of them by poets -- but not always. Sharing books we like is one of the pleasures of life, as far as I'm concerned. It's like passing on a memorable recipe or a personal story of how some writer's words made the world become more alive, more mysterious, more hospitable. These books invite you to enter them and be a part of their experience.

        -- Kathryn Stripling Byer, Poet Lariat, ex-cowgirl and devotee of Roy Rogers and Lash LaRue

The Man Who, by Anthony S. Abbott

(Charlotte, N.C.: Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2005)

Anthony S. Abbott's The Man Who, I believe, presents a triumph of the imagination, as Abbott (the man and the poet) tries to find words for what it's like to be human, to live with grief and loss -- and to long to make sense, however transitory, of one's predicament in the universe. Abbott's eye, dramatically dedicated to memory, attempts to balance contradictory experiences, endorsing words as necessary matter.

More than anything else, The Man Who presents Abbott's love of life, of words, particularly poetry in drama, as each plays on the other, creating one aesthetic shaped in pain and joy -- earned in the heart's and mind's experiences, hard out of one individual's struggle to say Yes to what the soul seeks. -- Shelby Stephenson

Shelby Stephenson's most recent book, Possum, is published by Bright Hill Press, 2004. He is the editor of Pembroke Magazine, based at Pembroke University, where he is a professor of English literature.

The Man Who Cannot Not Find Words
For Bob Manning

The man who cannot find words stares.
at the empty page. His friend's wife has died,
and he has tried for weeks to write. Everything
he says seems obscene as the mealy-mouthed
platitudes of Job's comforters. Perhaps silence
is better.
            But he must write. Silence presumes
indifference, and he is not indifferent. When
his daughter died so many years ago, he had
no words, and it almost killed him. And when,
at last he began to speak, it was a voice new
to him, a child born of his loss.
                                           He needed to tell
his friend what he had learned. Not tell him
what it meant or why.

No point in asking why. All the whys
in human history and beyond add up
to heartbreak quadrupled. Nothing there.
He had asked "where," and prayed for dreams
In which she'd talk to him. She never did.

So what could he say to his friend? That at first
it hurt like hell, that pain was pain and God was
gone and the silence was forever, that one day
he found a word here, a word there, a sprout
growing up out of all that muck and then another?
That she was speaking in him, through him,
that people looked at him and thought him strange?

Then he knows what he must do.

The man who cannot find words puts on his coat
and goes out the door. He will walk to his friend's
house and knock on the door and wait in silence
till he comes.

The Man Who Was Surprised into Sight
                                                               1.
A museum, yes. Yawns and boredom strike
even before the first picture. Another
cultural icon -- another obligation
of the literate man. He goes because
he's been told to go, and he's getting old.

Good. He's paid his way. He enters the first
hall and remembers that no one has
told him what to see. He cannot name
a single painting here. He'll just walk
and see what catches his eye. The first

tears come when he sees the Renoir --
the mother and two girls with dark,
dark eyes, the smaller one holding the odd
doll. It's as if we have always known them.
He turns, then comes back for another look.

2.
Across the way a woman seems bathed
in light, smiling at a red-coated officer
whose face we cannot see. Above her is
a map, exquisite in detail. The window
stands open. He's seen this face, this map

before in classes and in books, but
reproductions are as nothing before
the work itself which seeming to tell
nothing tells all. There's a second two rooms
down, the guard tells him. Don't get too close

or you'll activate alarms. He walks through
a paneled study on the way, looking
beyond to the unmistakable bright
yellow of the woman's smock. The maid
holds a letter. The woman stops to think.

Will she send the letter? Is it worth
the risk? The light comes from the viewer's space
making the yellow glow almost like gold.
Her left hand's fingers touch her chin,
the right hand pauses on the table.

"Oh my God," he says, and again, "Oh
My God." Music begins in the garden
court where wedding guests will soon appear.
Fish swim in the garden pool. Barbet's
bronze angel stands guard. He walks toward the music.

3.
But the garden court is closed. He enters
the next room, where an old friend greets him.
Sir Thomas More. Reproduced in every
English text and history. Thomas More
gazing eastward across the fireplace

at his implacable enemy -- Thomas Cromwell.
More's steadfast gaze and Cromwell's scorn.
On the other side, two Titians, and over
the fireplace itself a gaunt Jerome in crimson
by El Greco, brooding silently on faith.

4.
What can be said? The man's whole life has come
to this moment, these rooms. He is afraid
to go on, afraid to encounter one
more dream restored. Too much, or not enough?
Too fast, too slow? He sinks into a chair

and looks up at Millet's peasant girl
sewing by lamplight, her peaceful face
engrossed in the simple work. She is more
beautiful in the glow of this small lamp
than all of Fragonard's powdered duchesses.

5.
He will keep these moments forever.
"Spots of time," said Wordsworth, speaking
of the first light of childhood. Maybe he's
known them someplace else, Vermeer's
women, Millet's simple girl -- his daughter

no doubt. He wants to touch them, to feel
their soft skin with his fingers. But it's
only paint, only color on a flat canvas.
He doesn't believe that. Outside in the
February air, he can see his breath.

The sun shines on his red scarf. He
buttons his coat and walks all the way
to Washington Square.

The Man Who Feels the Sleeves of the Snow

On the day after the snow
He takes his usual walk.
The trees
reach out to him.
Their silver sleeves
have no history
no memory of grief.
Their long white fingers
know only
the sweet silence
of now.

The Man Who Speaks to His Daughter on Her 40th Birthday
May 8, 2003

                                           1.
"Poetry is the supreme fiction," says Wallace Stevens.
I know. Then how to express the truth, simple
and unadorned as Stevens's "dresser of deal."

You see, I am already equivocating, ducking
behind the decoration of language. So, stop me.
Good. That's better. Now, tell me where you are.

If that's too hard, just tell me -- something.
Or appear to me in a dream, or leave a symbol somewhere --
some mysterious talisman that lets me know it's you.

Not the feather floating down trick, that's too common.
Nor bumping around in the old house. Something original
like your name spelled in shells before the tide comes in.

                                           2.
All right, let me try it another way. When you were
three, I let you go to school in the winter without
leggings, without anything to warm your legs.

The teacher told me at the end of the day
and I burned with shame. You were my favorite person;
I was yours. And what I really want to know --

now that all the nonsense about your ghostly reappearance
is out of the way---what I really want to know is
where we would have gone, you and I. I want

to think of you at fourteen or twenty-four
or even thirty-one, want to picture you, know
the clothes you would have worn and how

you would have cut your hair. Early this morning
I walked in the rain to your grave. The tree is gone.
You know I picked the spot because the tree
was there, and now it's vanished like my images
of you. Damn it, anyway. I'm supposed to be
a writer, supposed to create you at twenty-five

or thirty-nine, give you a history. What would
you like? A husband, three children of your own?
A law practice in the suburbs of Boston?

                                           3.
I'm such a romantic fool. That's the problem.
The way I see it, I'm sitting in a tea room
in London, it's raining, of course it's raining.

Umbrella stand inside the door. Dripping coats
hanging on the wall. My hands cupped around
a hot mug of tea. I'm breathing steam. I look up.

There you are, at forty, looking at me with so
much love I feel my body rising from the floor.
You walk over. I try to stand. "No," you say,

"Sit down and rest." You place your hands
on my head and tell me all the years were
nothing -- a grain of sand , one grain of sand --

that's all. You tell me you'll come for me
whenever it's right, and then you're gone.
The bell rings, door closes, flash of a heel

And then, nothing but the steady fall of rain.
They look at me, there in the shop, all of them,
and then I laugh and cry, too, I'm sure.

Pretty improbable, don't you think? Wouldn't
sell even in Hollywood, or would it? Still,
dammit, I wish you'd talk to me.

The Man Whose Mother Was a Boy

"When I was a boy," my mother used to say.
It made me wild. "You can't be a boy,"
I would scream in a very un-boy way.
"Oh yes," she said, "I was a boy before
I became a girl." "Nooo," I cried plaintively,
deceived, depressed, denied the logic
of my simple boy's mind.
                               "When I was a little boy,"
my mother said, "I climbed trees and ran
away from home one night under the Georgia
stars. They found me in a barn and turned me
into a girl so I couldn't escape
anymore. Then I wore dresses and learned
to smile."
            Sometimes I became confused and
cried, "My mother was a bird, my mother
was a bird." "Indeed she was," my grandmother
said. "She was a bird, indeed."

Maybe it was she who flew over the house
the other day, and across the lake, diving
to the east, then rising and picking up speed
till she disappeared.

Anthony S. Abbott began teaching English at Davidson College in 1964. In 1990 he was named Charles A. Dana Professor of English. He served as the department's chair from 1989 to 1996. Davidson honored him for his teaching with the Thomas Jefferson Award in 1969 and the Hunter-Hamilton Love of Teaching Award in 1997.

Mr. Abbott's major fields of interest are modern drama (he has directed eight plays for the Davidson Community Players), creative writing, and literature and religion. He is the author of two critical studies, Shaw and Christianity(1965) and The Vital Lie: Reality and Illusion in Modern Drama (1989). His poems have appeared in numerous magazines and journals including New England Review, Southern Poetry Review, St. Andrews Review, Pembroke, Tar River Poetry, Theology Today, and Anglican Theological Review. St. Andrews Press published his first book of poems, The Girl in the Yellow Raincoat, in 1989. St. Andrews published his second poetry collection, A Small Thing Like A Breath, in 1993, and his third, The Search for Wonder in the Cradle of the World, in 2000. In 2003 his first novel, Leaving Maggie Hope, won the Novello Award and was published by Novello Festival Press. The novel won the "Gold Award" from ForeWord Magazine in the literary fiction category.

Mr. Abbott is past president of the Charlotte Writers Club and the North Carolina Writers Network and also past chairman of the North Carolina Writers Conference. He has won the Thomas H. McDill Award of the North Carolina Poetry Society three times. In 1978 he was a William Atherton Scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Between 1985 and 1992 he served on the Governor's Committee for the North Carolina Awards. In 1996 St. Andrews College honored him with the Sam Ragan Award for his writing and his service to the literary community of North Carolina.

He is married to the former Susan Dudley of South Orange, NJ. They have three sons, David, Stephen, and Andrew, and seven grandchildren, James, Robert, Clara, Elliot, Henry, Josephine, and John.

Vanished, by Carolyn Beard Whitlow

(Detroit, MI: Lotus Press, Inc., 2005)

We have a siren who lives by metaphor, all the neighborhoods she's occupied, traversed, transcended . . . . This is a poet with fluency and cadence in prosody, an inclination toward Motown and the blues, but feints in sestina and villanelle for both circularity and word-play. She attends to organization, in units, as increment, as progression: so many losses, frustrations, but beneath the gloss of voicings "within the veil," a prideful storytelling in oragami detail: all in her own idiom. In her world one can become one's own parents and kinfolk, the ancestors singing. -- Michael S. Harper

Michael S. Harper is the author of more than ten books of poetry, including two -- Images of Kin and Dear John, Dear Coltrane -- which were nominated for the National Book Award. He was the first Poet Laureate of the State of Rhode Island (1988-1993) and has received many other honors, including a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing fellowship. Mr. Harper is University Professor and Professor of English at Brown University, where he has taught since 1970. He lives in Barrington, Rhode Island.

Travel Paradelle

I travel through books, afraid to go outside.
I travel through books, afraid to go outside
where high strung telephone wires wind east.
Where high strung telephone wires wind east
through travel books, east to where strung high wires
wind, I go telephone outside, afraid --

a sightless pilot cited for steering blindly.
A sightless pilot cited for steering blindly,
plane bumps down, slides, slipping forward fast.
Plane bumps down, slides, slipping forward fast,
slipping down fast, forward, a plane slides,
pilot, sightless, cited for steering bumps blindly.

Woman orbits man; in stasis, he has the control.
Woman orbits man; in stasis, he has the control:
he's a train in her tunnel leaving no tracks.
He's a train in her tunnel leaving no tracks.
Woman has the control? A train man in stasis in her
tunnel? He orbits, leaving. No tracks! He's...

man, he's a train, fast, he slides where a pilot
has telephone control, bumps down blindly in her
wind tunnel leaving no tracks, plane in stasis
orbits the woman, cited for steering sightless,
high, east, through strung wires slipping forward.
Afraid to go where? Outside. I travel through books.

Legacy

Mother loved Bartlett & Anjou,
licorice, peanut brittle,
astringent lemons, emollient olive oil,
should my daughters ever want
her hibiscus to unfold --

Wrapped packages at John Wanamaker's
worshipped at St. Philip's
adored symphonies & Ellington jazz
Billy Eckstein croons
(wasn't much for blues)
& pictures though not Van Der Zee
prove her size 5 shoes
stomped at the Savoy
stood in line at the Apollo
truckled off to Washington, D.C.
in government employ --

Lindy Hopped to Detroit, slipped
& snagged a Georgia boy
then polished to a shine
for seventeen years
her wool-scraped coat
so her children would be
haves not have nots
& spoke only to curse
fuss or scold...

Struck by the sparsity,
what little I know,
phone my mother's brother, ask
their grandfather's name --

               ...Moses, I think...same as my father.
             Sorry. Folks just didn't talk back then."

Secrets the only legacy.
Silence their only story.
Questions a sin.

Local Call

You handle me like I'm a local call.
I'm expensive. Long distance -- although
having never been loved I don't know how

to tell you so. So I answer the phone,
anticipate its diamond ring and let
you handle me like I'm a local call,

your line old as an old simile, stale
as a dead metaphor, you who's always had,
having. Never been loved, I don't know how

not to wish you would not stop stop not
loving me, the sidewalk running past me,
you handle me like I'm a local, call,

laugh in another language, hung phone screaming,
me unsure whether my anger volcano or match --
I don't know, having never been loved, how

to love, my mind stalled with graffiti,
imagination sore, hum "Don't want nobody
don't want me," accept your local call,
having never been loved, knowing I don't know how.

Mantra in the Morning

I went away and met myself a new
brand, no one knew me, brand new me,
the time seven and change in the morning

for a change, no more tourist in your own life,
imposter wearing your body, living your life.
I went away and met my self, a new

self, woman with voice for a change, virtuoso,
voice its own instrument, arranger, conductor,
the time for change seven in the morning.

For a change go away, change if you want to,
just change anyway, any way you want to:
I went away, met myself anew, a new

brand, no one knew me, brand new me,
and you can, you can change this time,
the time seven and change in the morning

at seven, or seventy, change, seven come
eleven times seven, change brands, just change
at seven and change the time in the morning.
I went away and met my new self anew.

Sinkin'

           Moonshine in the sun shine,
                 don't shine much a'tall.

                                  Moonshine when the sun shine,
                                             don't shine much a'tall.

                                                        Cock crow in the hen house --
                                                                    sho' is a flo' show.

An' you a sweet som'in, Daddy,
          long as you is tall.

                      Say, you a sweet som'in, Poppa,
                                 long as you is tall.

                                               But when I starts to lovin'
                                                        my windfall's a short fall.

Need more coffee in my coffee, Honey,
          don't want no sugar in my tea.

                      Coffee black, Honey,
                                 don't want no sugar in my tea.

                                               Wanna feel, when you lovin' me, Daddy,
                                                        ocean drownin' in my sea.

Boat be rockin' even on dry land.
           Say, I need my boat be rockin',
                        rockin' on dry land --

                                             Current take me under,
                                                        Sun can't, moon can --

Ain't had no lover las' some years
         'cept me.

                   Ain't had no lovin' last for years
                            'cept me --

                                      Gon' find another lover,
                                                snake, or rock or tree.

Sunshine sinkin' in moonshine
           don't shine much a'tall.

                      Moonshine drownin' in sunshine,
                                 don't shine much at all.

                                            Cock, Crow, in the henhouse
                                                       sho' is a flo' show --

                                                                   -- for Sherley Anne Williams,
                                                                              in memoriam

Carolyn Beard Whitlow is Charles A. Dana Professor of English at Guilford College, in Greensboro, where she teaches creative writing and African-American literature. A finalist for the 1991 Barnard New Women Poets Prize and the 2005 Ohio State University Poetry Prize, she won the 2006 Naomi Long Madgett Prize in Poetry. The prize included publication by Lotus Press of the winning manuscript, Vanished. Ms. Whitlow wrote her first poem while a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University and subsequently completed the M.F.A. at Brown University, where she won the Rose Low Rome Memorial Prize in Poetry, and was named Phi Beta Kappa Poet in 1989. Lost Roads published her first collection of poems, Wild Meat, in 1986, and her poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Ms. Whitlow was one of ten North Carolina poets to appear in the 1997 WUNC-TV series "Poetry Live," hosted by Charles Kuralt. She has had two residencies at Yaddo and has also been a fellow at Cave Canem.