Celebrating 25 Years of the North Carolina Literary Review
refreshment that is only momentary. “I lean the saw against the step. Sun refracts / from the bright, honed teeth, specific for their work of parting.” One implication of the last sentences is that her morning work is a preparatory ritual; it helps the speaker to fortify her spirit for the inevitable end, as she saws two branches, one of them diseased, off the red cedar. The labor is salubrious for the sawyer and necessary for the health of the tree, but it also carries a symbolic function. This subject is treated more directly in “Choice of Words.” There are two situations. The speaker’s father lost his wife. “He is bereft, / robbed of his happiness, a widower, or widowman.” The speaker’s situation is different. “But I am separated, on the way to divorce, // terms for a civilized / coming apart.” However different the cases may be, “it’s all butchery // whatever the parting: / disjointed, sundered, severed.” The use of “parting” here is of course a direct reference to the last word of “Work in the Morning.”
But the last stanzas of “Choice of Words” do not dwell upon the fact of separation; they offer a glimpse of the future: A separation is also,
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. . . a mother scrubbing a child’s neck, a youth naked from the shower, an old man inspecting a worrisome mole –
however, embarkation. We stand at the rail, each waving a white handkerchief at the sinking shore.
Interpreting and reinterpreting the events of one’s life may be a matter of perspective. When you say goodbye to the shore, you are saying hello to the horizon. “Watch the Sun Come Up on Your Own Life” employs this sort of perspective as its theme. A tourist in Paris sits idly at a cafe table, taking in the sidewalk scene, the crowd, the traffic, “the diesel exhaust / along famous boulevards.” Familiar images these, and maybe a little shopworn. But if she took a glance at the apartments above, she could observe the intimacies of these lives:
If she took a different look, she would no longer be the average, listless tourist, but would find her “dutiful” body “newly not the same.” I have probably insisted too much on the unity of Hotel Worthy. It is not one long poem cut into pieces. There is plenty of variety: humor, surprise, landscape, travel, and personae. Nieman also includes the different forms of sestina, pantoum, and ghazal. Yet she has found thematic connections in her materials and has intertwined them in unobtrusive but significant ways. Maybe it is more accurate to call Hotel Worthy not a collection but a book of poems, a good book. n
MICHAEL PARKER HONORED AT THE 2015 NORTH CAROLINA WRITERS CONFERENCE PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW MOREHEAD
Michael Parker, Vacc Distinguished Professor in the MFA Writing Program at UNC Greensboro, was the honoree at the 2015 North Carolina Writers Conference, which convened in Washington, NC, in July. Parker is the author of eight books, most recently All I Have in This World, which was reviewed and excerpted in NCLR Online 2015. His previous honors include the North Carolina Award for Literature, which is the highest civilian honor given in the state. Watch and listen to the tributes paid to this Eastern North Carolina writer by Terry Kennedy, Parker’s former student, now colleague at UNC Wilmington; Kathy Pories, his editor at Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill; and Elizabeth Hudson, another former student, now editor of Our State magazine. And read more about the North Carolina Writers Conference in Fifty Splendid Summers: A Short History of the North Carolina Writers Conference 1950–1999, compiled by Charles Blackburn, Jr. and Robert G. Anthony, Jr. (available online here). n
ABOVE Michael Parker (right) with 2015 North Carolina Writers
Conference Chair Margaret Bauer and Secretary/Treasurer Jim Clark, Washington, NC, 24 July 2015