66
2016
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
TO KEEP IT FOREVER: NATURE AND MEMORY a review by Sarah Huener Coyla Barry. The Flying Days. Durham: Carolina Wren Press, 2014. John Hoppenthaler. Domestic Garden. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2015.
From the first poem of The Flying Days, “Fishermen,” Coyla Barry’s treatment of the natural world gives equal power to nature and to human belief. The unfathomable sea holds not promise for the speaker, but the speaker’s faith brings them a magnificent yield. In some ways, this poem is a figure for the book: Barry’s scenes don’t immediately impart a wealth of meaning, but they shift to revelation if you watch them long enough. In “Rain Crow,” a crow crites out as a storm is gathering. Welcoming the storm, desiring “something / I can never name or pray for,” the speaker is pulled back to a parallel feeling from childhood. As she watches the real-life, real-time woods become caves, the transition is so smooth it almost doesn’t exist. This act of watching feels true to the reader, because that’s how
SARAH HUENER received her BA from UNC Chapel Hill and her MFA from Boston University. Also a musician, Huener has traveled to Croatia and Israel as a Robert Pinsky Global Fellow. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and in 2014, she was a finalist for the Pocataligo Poetry Contest. Her poetry has been featured in Four Way Review and Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. COYLA BARRY earned a physiology degree from Vassar College and worked as a marine biologist for Yale until the 1970s. She then earned a master’s in Library Science from UNC Chapel Hill and worked as a research librarian for an international health care company until she retired to Durham, NC. Barry’s Creature and Creature received the 2001 Harperprints Chapbook competition from the North Carolina Writers’ Network. Finishing Line Press published her second chapbook, Swimming Woman: Poems from Montana, in 2009. Her poetry has also appeared in Tar River Poetry, Nimrod, Pedestal, Kakalak, and Southern Poetry Review. JOHN HOPPENTHALER is a professor in the English Department at East Carolina University. He has ser ved as the Gilber t-Chappell Distinguished Poet for the Eastern Region of North Carolina for two terms, was the Poetry Editor for Kestrel for eleven years, and currently serves as Advisory Editor to the cultural journal Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, where he also edits A Poetry Congeries. His other poetry collections, Lives of Water (2003) and Anticipate the Coming Reservoir (2008), were also published by Carnegie Mellon University Press.
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Rebecca Gayle Howell, “The Occasion of Poetry,” Poetry Magazine 17 Jun. 2015; web.
COURTESY OF COYLA BARRY
Writing serves many purposes, but perhaps the oldest and most basic is that of documentation. Keeping a ledger of harvest yields, writing children’s names in the family bible, saving letters long after the sender is dead – all these actions serve as a more permanent memory than speech. In The Flying Days, Coyla Barry deals closely with memory and nature, fixing in words the moments, visions, days that make up our lives. John Hoppenthaler, too, is concerned with catching hold of a specific past; his Domestic Garden is a personal panoply of significance. As Rebecca Gayle Howell put it in her essay on occasional poetry, both these poets “speaks into the forgetting air what should not be forgotten.”1
memory works: it happens to us rather than being an action of thought or intellect. The trigger is buried. This poem quietly embodies the inextricability of cause and sense, of figure and object, of signifier and signified. As it draws to a close, the speaker finally spots the actual crow, “Its mocking eye / the center of a maze, glimpsed and lost.” Here Barry overlays image, narrative, and resonance of content skillfully, so that the poem is the crow’s eye, or the act of the speaker’s observation is the glimpse, or the sycamore and shadow are the world. This is great understated writing. In the title poem, vultures prove to be an unexpected emblem of hope: near the end, “They crane their scrawny necks / and lift my heart.” Like the book, this poem is strongest when it draws the strangest comparisons; it is weakest where it falls back into the familiar or trips over its own mechanics. The poem opens, as many of Barry’s do, with a setting of scene: the vultures come
ABOVE Coyla Barry at the launch of her new poetry collection at Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill, NC, 8 May 2014