120
2013
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
number 22
courtesy of the Morehead-Cain Foundation
scuppernong, glassine, and besotted in the same collection? The poem “Repeating Field” begins with a strong image and then moves from one like sound to the next, sounds that need to be read aloud for the full effect: Innocenti sleep in her body as embryos float in a jar. Not to be coaxed into lambs. Never knock-kneed, nor nicked for wool to be carded into yarn. No narcotic click of knitting.
Some of the poems contain internal rhymes and an occasional end rhyme. “On Finding One’s Neighbor Dead in His Garden” is a Shakespearean sonnet. The poem “Night Swimming” has lush, lovely slant rhymes.
Night Swimming The tartness of winesaps augurs true fall: a smack and tang of attenuated air at the top of Brown’s Mountain, sprawled across the whole ache of sky, where the small pond’s a salver of stars and for an exquisite instant, I’m an infant feeling all: each star’s a sliver at the heart, each minnow an arrow in ink – and how a pond can save stories, stay starflooded, lightbearing, old, as we drop through layers of lake to the bottom: a cold eye.
Much of the enjoyment of reading Williams’s poems comes from their Middle English diction, which abounds throughout the book. “Small Diaspora,” the second poem, starts with a catalog of Middle and Old English words: From exuberant hanging gardens populous with knaves – rakes, lotharios, libertines, paladins, princelings, brigands, rogues, paramours, suitors, swain –
In the last three lines quoted, the etymology of all but lotharios, paladins, and rogues is from either Middle or Old English. There is even a poem titled “Ecstatic Etymologies,” which begins and ends with a nod to the etymology of the Middle English word tryst. Robust, deliberate diction and rhythmic syntax are, indeed, at the heart of this collection.
ABOVE North Carolina native Leslie Williams at a meeting for Morehead-Cain Scholars during her undergraduate days at UNC-Chapel Hill, circa 1990
Two poets, one art. Kathryn Kirkpatrick and Leslie Williams – each in her own style, with her own experiences to draw from – show the reader more than a thing or two about survival. Both poets go beyond the personal when writing about survival; but for Kirkpatrick it’s personal to the core, as she wills her body to undergo what it must to heal. She is after the sheer urgency of life: “Come back I whisper to the plum trees, / to the pear, to myself,” she says in her title poem. To her, survival is elemental. “Threshold,” an homage to her old dog who has peed on the floor and joined the poet in illness, ends with the lines, “Now this world is in you / and you are in this world.” In “Physical Therapy” the poet knows what it means to feel alive, when “sunlight finds its way / through the latticed glass panes – // I am here.” On the other hand, as Leslie Williams states in “The Flower of the Wheat,” one can aim “to have both bread and foxgloves.” With her hold on day-today life feeling less tenuous than that of Kirkpatrick, she takes a philosophical look at survival in “When the Sky Falls We Shall Have Larks,” where she contemplates whether “To ravish each day as if the last // Or to go about each as if it lasts / In ordinary splendor, on and on, forever.” There’s a certain spirit of wildness, headiness, and abandon in some of the early poems that are about subjects such as spring, night swimming, and eating blackberries. “Light a Candle, Put It Under a Bowl,” a letter to St. Catherine of Siena, asks, “how can austerity be the way / when most of what we know is gained / by saying yes.” Both Williams and Kirkpatrick leave the reader finishing the last page of each book with the feeling that the poems have reached deep to say something that these two poets found impossible to leave unsaid. And isn’t that exactly what we turn to poetry for? n
Leslie Williams received her BA from UNC-Chapel Hill and her MA from the University of Virginia. Her honors include the 2010 Bellday Books Poetry Award and the Poetry Society of America’s Robert H. Winner Memorial Award.