114
2014
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
number 23
1. The town I grew up in is feminine a radiating spiral divided in two named for Charlotte of Mecklenburg, a Queen who had mixed bloodlines all of them blue:
as landmark stores. Her experience in family, in this place, is central, and the simplest poems are often the most affecting. In “An Early Arts Education,” the child narrator is happily painting a yellow lion until the teacher intervenes:
African, Portuguese and a Vandal or two. so this double crown I set out to hone – half on, half off, made-up and true. Fifteen sonnets linked and sewn
I watch in horror as she paints a black iron manacle around the forepaw of my lion then
in all manner of newfangled rhyme; only locals know which avenue wends over to trace a parallel line, Crowns for Charlotte, Laurels for you –
despite my protestations row upon row of interlocking X’s over the entire painting
Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg now come forth to crown us all with a laurel wreath –
That’s the fence
The spirit has been invoked and we must wend our way, like Brown, through the spirals of memory and the movements of our lives, parallel or diverging, within our chosen home place.
She says
This volume, so focused on the Tar Heel State, is appropriately a local production, No. 15 in the Carolina Wren Press Poetry Series. The closing section is not merely a sonnet corona, but a heroic crown: fifteen sonnets, each linked by repeating the final line of the preceding sonnet as the first line of the next. The final sonnet binds up the whole by using all of the first lines of the others, in order. Brown draws on letters, films, portraits, books, and other resources to address Queen Charlotte’s life – beginning with a traditional sonnet in rhyme and meter, then spinning that out into free verse and forward to the present day. The opening sonnet of “Double Crown for Charlotte” is a précis, in fact, of much of Brown’s book, the ideas of unity and division, race and family, truth and fiction, collage and completion: Photographs by Jane A. Wiley
“And so in the end, it comes to this: this is the center of my heart: empty and dark with the cold of space forever expanding between me and you,” writes Kennedy in “Breaking the Glass.” The universe by its nature pulls apart, but it also seethes with an unexplained presence. “It turns out that roughly 68% of the Universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest – everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter – adds up to less than 5% of the Universe,” reports NASA. “Come to think of it, maybe it shouldn’t be called ‘normal’ matter at all, since it is such a small fraction of the Universe.”4 The “normal matter” of the human heart might be similar – much of it dark, sometime most of it. In these collections, the dark matter of love and loss burns with a strange energy. And that five percent, emerging as light? That portion of the universe we see and know? Ah, that five percent is joy. n
Lee Ann Brown’s earlier books include The Sleep That Changed Everything (Wesleyan, 2003), and In the Laurels, Caught (Fence Books, 2013). She holds an MFA from Brown University, is the founder of Tender Buttons Press, and divides her time between Marshall, NC, and her work as an associate professor of English at St. John’s University in New York City.
4
“Dark Energy, Dark Matter,” NASA: web. above left and right Lee Ann
Brown at Park Road Books in Charlotte, NC, 10 July 2013