60
2016
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
COURTESY OF NORTH CAROLINA COLLECTION, UNC CHAPEL HILL LIBRARY
a colonial system bent on turning humans and the planet to dust. In the poem “Rainmaker,” Hedge Coke returns to the images of extinct, endangered, and exploited birds: “Carolina parakeets. / Passenger pigeons. / Venezuelan oily birds gone to conquistador war lights. / Canaries, still suffering souls for coal.” The end-stops on each line mark a finality wrought through destruction, but her father’s shell-shaking ceremony renders a hope in the rain that “holds memory” across time. The poem closes with a repetition of eight enjambed lines until the final iteration of “Daddy called for rain.” Then it offers, “Like we all always do. / Always do. / Like we will always do. / Always do.” The eight lines of “Daddy called for rain” evoke images of the poet’s father circling the four directions, not once but twice, spiraling in and out of his ceremonial call for healing, and the final four lines pull indigenous people together into the ceremony with the collective “all.” Even more significantly, Hedge Coke signals
a collective future in the change from “all” to “will” in the line’s second iteration. This collective future is supported by the repetition of the phrase “always do,” signaling these Native lifeways as eternal, forward looking, and most importantly, active. In other words, Hedge Coke’s poetic use of indigenous knowledges, aesthetics, and structures is not merely a gratuitous window-dressing of authenticity or words that sit on the page in a state of passive being. Rather, they are active linguistic agents; they are words that “always do.” In addition to offering an indigenous perspective throughout the collection, Hedge Coke also works within an American literary genealogy. These two currents of meaning are not mutually exclusive, however. Rather she weaves them together and in so doing, demonstrates how they have long informed one another. Readers will catch a glimpse of William Carlos Williams’s plums as they listen to LeAnne Howe shake shells and ponder Robert Creeley’s divergences from his Black Mountain peers. In the poem “America, I Sing You Back,” Hedge Coke echoes Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes. This poem, though, does not hear America singing, and it does not add to the chorus of “I, Too.” Instead, Hedge Coke gathers up the spirit of Whitman and Hughes and takes the song back further. She follows the beat to an indigenous continent that sings to America in its cradleboard: “Before America began to sing, I sung her to sleep.” As with several of her other poems
in the collection, this movement backward simultaneously opens up future spaces as she offers to America to “Sing you home into yourself and back to reason.” In its form, the poem tugs at Whitman’s poetics in such a way that reminds the reader that his style has older relatives than the Fireside Poets that came before. Whereas Whitman hears America singing, Hedge Coke offers us the original song. Simply put, Streaming is a gorgeous book from a poet at the top of her game. The central images of the collection float from page to page, and the book achieves a true coherence from poem to poem, telling the story of an American continent that must reckon with some hard truths in order to survive. However, the book is not all bleak. Hedge Coke reminds us that the knowledge that will get us to the next world is already here among us. Most enjoyable is how this book complements the tapestry of our state. I had the pleasure of reading this book on the shores of Kitty Hawk, and I read this book looking out across the sound west to Roanoke Island. I read this book in the shadow of Grandfather Mountain on lands once used as an old mica mine; I read this book on the banks of the Oconaluftee; and I read this book within a stone’s throw of the Great Trading Path as it winds its way through the Piedmont. Everywhere I read this book, it read back to me. Streaming is a love letter to this planet, and much to our benefit, Hedge Coke carves out a special place for the tiny beautiful bit of it we call North Carolina. n
LEFT Lithograph of Carolina parakeets by John James Audubon