2017
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
COURTESY OF MALAPROP’S BOOKSTORE
136
our bodies into what all beauty is at its source: illusion. Call us greedy. The flawed fiends we always have been, and forgive our natures. We have wanted to bloom and bleed and be honest guides here despite hundred-plus days of heat where a nap beneath live oak shade might just kill you. Here we have stolen but also given. Here our bodies’ rot blooms other wildflowers. Here in this landscape of the damned where drought plagues rattlesnakes, even, we await your visit.
Given Brownlee’s repeated indictment of religion and the Baptist mindset – which itself comes close to preaching – it is not surprising that there is little humor in his book, except perhaps, for one section of his long poem “Disappearing Town”: At the store people walk up to me out of nowhere and ask if I need salvation. “Trust in God,” one man says in the aisle where I buy condoms, “and you will not need them.” I tell him, “Thank you, sir, for your candor,” and then, “Bless you for that.” At 20, sex is strange to me so I cannot imagine love without Trojans, but perhaps this man feels the same strangeness as me – albeit in reverse. He can’t imagine love made to his wife with latex between them.
Just two pages into Mary Kratt’s Watch Where You Walk, we learn that her mother was a “country preacher’s daughter” who spent “long Sabbath afternoons / with no comics, cards, or radio,” and urged her own daughter to “Sing, child, sing. / You can’t think
ABOVE Scott Brownlee reading at Malaprop’s Bookstore, Asheville, NC, 19 Nov. 2015
dark thoughts / while you are singing.” In subsequent poems, she sings and celebrates her parents, both teachers, as she herself would be. Stricken with childhood polio, her mother taught high school English and Latin; she also told good stories that were “true . . . but stretched.” Mother and father endured the death of Mary’s brother to the “creeping horror” of ALS. In the beautiful “Trees of the Southern Forest,” we learn her father had been a “fisherman, teacher, principal, / and after the Great Depression, / a newspaper man.” He managed to buy twenty acres of mountain forest where, before entering “the wide cave of the hospital,” he walked with Mary around their “hilly yard / hemlock, white pine, pussy willow, / the red stalks of rhubarb, silky corn. / And stalwart hives of bees.” Suffering appears early in the book when her mother enters an assisted-living home where she quotes Bible verses and Shakespeare and sings hymns in the hallways. Then dementia worsens, and she becomes slowly more silent, finally not even recognizing her daughter, just “waiting on salvation.” In another section, thinking about her father after his death, Kratt watches a heron in green-water shallows spear “something shiny”: If I take my eyes away, then look back, he is not there. But he is there like this ache for you who will no longer gaze at sails, buoys, the dock or search whitecaps warning of rough weather.
As the title of her volume suggests, Mary Kratt is an intense watcher and has a painter’s eye when it comes to capturing place. Just consider the first two sections of “On the Chesapeake”: The wind is from the south and boats turn into it. Swallows with their peach bellies and chittery calls, sail over the wet black dog who noses his last route around. This is that time toward evening when all the boats change; in our deep cove, they rise