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2013
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
Means of Survival a review by Susan Laughter Meyers Kathryn Kirkpatrick. Unaccountable Weather. Winston-Salem: Press 53, 2011. Leslie Williams. Success of the Seed Plants. Durham and Pittsburgh: Bellday Books, 2010.
Susan Laughter Meyers, a North Carolina native, is the author of Keep and Give Away (University of South Carolina Press, 2006). Her most recent collection, My Dear, Dear Stagger Grass, is the inaugural winner of the Cider Press Review’s Editor’s Prize and will be published in 2013. Her reviews have appeared in such venues as South Carolina Review, The Post and Courier, Calyx, and NCLR Online 2012. Read a sample of her poetry in this issue of NCLR Online and also in the print issue of NCLR 2013.
ABOVE Right Kathryn Kirkpatrick reading at a North Carolina Poetry Society event at McIntyre’s Fine Books in Pittsboro, NC, 22 July, 2012
In their recent poetry collections Kathryn Kirkpatrick and Leslie Williams both reveal an intelligent approach to the wide-ranging theme of survival, the intelligence evidenced in large part by their obvious love of language. These are not poets who call attention to their work with pyrotechnics. Instead, Kirkpatrick lays down word after precise word to say the painfully unsayable. She occasionally turns to a variety of voices, modulating the diction, syntax, and tone to suit the persona, while Williams displays an entirely likable leaning toward Middle English diction. Kirkpatrick’s book has a decidedly more feminist stance. Williams’s poems are notable for the leaps that occur along her book’s highly associative path. Both poets know their craft, as they create for the reader an immediacy of place and circumstance, a boldness of spirit that is inviting and ultimately rewarding. Kathryn Kirkpatrick’s Unaccountable Weather, her fourth and most urgent volume of poetry, ostensibly delves into the emotions and particulars of surviving breast cancer, the heart of a book that from the very first poem broadens out from its powerful subject. Interwoven among the cancer poems are poems of mythology that portray such characteristics as strength, courage, suffering, and mystery. We’re told in an endnote that these poems were inspired by an art exhibit called The Goddess Paintings. These goddess poems – “Athena,” “Artemis,” “Astarte,” and others – heighten the power of the cancer poems by relating to them, while at the same time turning the reader in a tangential direction away from the subject of illness. The poet is also smart in the way she manages time in the collection. The first and last poems
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return to the past, the speaker’s personal past in the first poem, and a cultural past exhibited in cave paintings mentioned in the final poem. In both poems the voice turns to the collective “we” – speaking in the first poem, “Called Back,” for the poet’s generation of young girls growing up rootless in suburbs, after the atomic bomb and during an era when everything was touted as new and better. It was a period, too, of ignorance about a number of habits and behaviors later determined to be health hazards – such as sunbathing in a time before sunscreens. After all, how better to beautify a pale body than slather it in grease before the ritual of lying for hours in the sun for the purpose of attaining a golden tan? It is only in the subsequent poems that the reader sees where the poet is going with a cruel chronology that brings about the eventual diagnosis of breast cancer. Besides the poems that reach back to the past, there are numerous poems, serious and necessary poems, that take place in the present moment – “Department of Mammography, Because I Want to Live”; “Chemotherapy”; “Physical Therapy”; “Radiation Treatments” – as well as lyrical intervals offered by the goddess poems. But not all of the poems of the present are serious. Several of the persona poems offer comic relief: “Maria Makes Out” and “Donna Goes Dancing,” for example, portray women who have come through breast cancer surgeries with a strong, sassy sense of humor intact. Kirkpatrick is a long-time resident of the mountains of North Carolina, and the alternately lush and harsh Blue Ridge landscape is important to her poems. “After the April Freeze,” for example,