22
2017
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
FINALIST, 2016 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE BY KATHRYN KIRKPATRICK
sun – rising, – downing I wake to the nerve’s heat, my body a shock of dawn, and as if my sheepdog knows, feels the pulse of consciousness change, he wakes too. Though he’s a floor below, and we’ve hardly stirred, Cuig starts his yodel, his sun-rising, his call to the pack, his pulling at the light, as he does each morning, a regular rooster of a dog, dead certain this is the way a new day is greeted. We call. He comes. We gentle him quiet as no one did the wheel-chaired woman last week in the dementia wing who howled at the failing light. Urgent and needful, she rose up to deliver those notes. Sun-downing. Music and mania. She heralds dusk, Cuig dawn. They take up the ritual of turning the day. I listen to the dance of voice and light. To sing the sun up or down is hard work. Hard to make that sound, harder to hear it. As I wake to the nerve’s heat, my body a shock of dawn, I know again that shift from sleep to light, that ancient fear of night. COURTESY OF THE ASHEVILLE ART MUSEUM
Window and Sun, 1951 (oil painting, 34x28) by Jacqueline Herrmann Gourevitch
KATHRYN KIRKPATRICK holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from Emory University and is now a Professor of English at Appalachian State University where she teaches environmental literature, creative writing, and Irish studies. Her poetry collections include three Brockman-Campbell award volumes: The Body’s Horizon (Signal Books, 1996), Her Small Hands Were Not Beautiful (Clemson University Digital Press, 2014), and Our Held Animal Breath (WordTech, 2012); Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Prize winner Beyond Reason (Pecan Grove Press, 2004); Out of the Garden (Mayapple Press, 2007), a finalist for the Southern Independent Booksellers Association poetry award; and Unaccountable Weather (Press 53, 2011, reviewed in NCLR Online 2013). She has also received an Academy of American Poets poetry prize. She has held writing residencies at Norton Island in Maine and the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Ireland. Her long poem about Maud Gonne in six voices was performed in 2013 as part of the Yeats Summer School festivities in Sligo, Ireland. Read another one of her poems, also a finalist in the 2016 Applewhite Poetry Prize competition, in the 2017 print issue.
JACQUELINE HERRMANN GOUREVITCH was born in Paris, France. She attended the High School of Music and Art in New York and, in the summer of 1950, Black Mountain College in Asheville, NC, followed by studies at the University of Chicago and the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students’ League in New York City. Gourevitch taught painting at Wesleyan University from 1978 to 1989 and drawing at the Cooper Union from 1989 to 1992. She currently lives in New York City where she continues to paint and exhibit her work. In 2000, Gourevitch was awarded a Studioscape Residency, sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Council, on the 91st floor in Tower #1 of the World Trade Center. Her work has been exhibited widely and is in major collections in the US.