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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
the building abandoned years ago . . . The utter childlessness of the playground fronts it, lifeless swings, foot-worn furrows beneath, once slick from use, almost closed over.
With childhood gone, what remains is memory, grief, and, as she suggests a few poems later in “Ground Truth,” an “afternoon’s concession / to another dusk – severe, more common truth.” As the Old South continues to give way to the New South, with the contesting and rupturing such transition requires, I’m glad that Emerson’s poetry remains a trusted, unflinching, and crucial lens through which to consider what has “fallen away then from the present / tense into reminiscence – the lucid was” (“The Present Tense”). photograph by ANDREW MOREHEAD
children’s bodies captured, though artificially, in medias res, as if each child remains launched and fixed at some nascent point of its swinging into maturity: one with a “face still round with baby fat”; one with a book in her hand, “her left thumb holding down the page, place marked / as though in a passage to which she will return”; another posed with her living cat, the bell she’d fasten to his neck almost audible with “the small cheerful sounding / of return, the smaller sound of vanishing.” Section five presents the reader with gestures similar to those in Soniat’s collection. “Some of the youngest children,” the poem reveals, “have wasted / into the appearance of the very old,” and later in the section, Emerson writes, “And some have their hands tied as though in bondage; / this is, the photographer’s notes instruct, / to prevent displacement, the body’s slow – / certain restlessness that does not die.” This restlessness of the body in its passage to dust is akin to the restlessness behind the poet’s continuing urge to write about these passages, and like the tethering tree that restricts the swing’s arc, the bondage here is necessary for any outward flight to proceed. It is the friction between momentum (desire) and tether (that fixed point from which our vectoring proceeds) that provides the tension of life and art, and, rendered in these photos as art, the deceased children are captured somewhere between origin and the country of their final destination. Section II begins with “Animal Funerals, 1964,” a poem about children practicing for what comes next, vectoring toward roles they will one day assume, “preacher, undertaker” or “a straggling congregation / reciting what we could of the psalm // about green pastures” This poem segues into “First Death,” a poem about the speaker’s first experience with human death, and it is at this point of the book that we experience a shift from childhood poems into poems of increasing experience with the poet taking on the job of reportage, as the poet has Walter Cronkite do in “Zenith,” “cataloging / the dead nightly in a country we’ve not yet heard of.” “Old Elementary” provides a grim figure for the shift:
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Though frequently in a more humorous register, the poems in Catherine Carter’s second full-length collection, The Swamp Monster At Home, also concern themselves with launching out into the future and the inevitable death that marks the end of that vector. As with the other two volumes discussed, Carter’s collection begins at some spot that looks out upon hereafter while reflecting upon origin, the first lines of its first poem, “The Dawn of Time,” insisting that
ABOVE Catherine Carter reading at NCLR’s publication party at City Lights Bookstore in downtown Sylva, NC, 10 Sept. 2011