162
2019
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
BLUE BLAZES a review by Catherine Carter Beth Copeland. Blue Honey. Milton, DE: Broadkill River Press, 2018. Dede Wilson. Under the Music of Blue. Athens, GA: FutureCycle Press, 2017.
CATHERINE CARTER lives with her husband in Cullowhee, near Western Carolina University, where she teaches in the English Education and Professional Writing programs. She reviews for NCLR regularly, and her poems have appeared in several issues. She has been a frequent James Applewhite Poetry Prize finalist. In 2017, she received third place for “Billy Collins Pours Me a Beer” (published in NCLR 2018), and in 2018, she won the Applewhite prize. Read her winning poem “Womb-Room” in the 2019 print issue. Carter’s work has also appeared in Best American Poetry 2009, Orion, Poetry, Asheville Poetry Review, Tar River Review, and Ploughshares, among other literary magazines. She serves as assistant poetry editor for Cider Press Review and as the Jackson County regional representative for North Carolina Writers’ Network-West.
It would be difficult to find two books of poetry from a single year that benefit more from being read together than Dede Wilson’s Under the Music of Blue and Beth Copeland’s Blue Honey. Both midcareer books by white women, each delves into the anguish of family life through repeated images of blueness (twelve poems in Copeland’s book contain references to blue, as do four in Wilson’s). Both are elegiac, plumbing the “blues” evoked by their difficult subject matter – the loss of a child, the dissolution brought about by dementia, and the disappointments and failures of marriage. Both offer hope without certainty, and both finally stand upon the only support they have – the power of the telling, of the word. Otherwise, however, the two books sing very different blues. Dede Wilson’s Under the Music of Blue centers around the loss of a daughter through a series of recurring motifs of stars (often the kind that children stick onto ceilings), dust, sleep, and morning/mourning in poems ranging from the formal to the very spare – spare to the point where the poems sometimes dip into the waters of the slightly surreal. Under the Music of Blue writes its own epigraph, beginning with an ekphrastic meditation on a bronze figure by Barlach, “The Ecstatic Man,” whom the speaker conflates with Matsuo Bash, the seventeenth-century Edo poet and master of the haiku. Wilson envisions him “whipped” by winter sleet and slogging along in clothes weighted by rain, but suddenly shouting in excitement when “the flawless word / breaks in your breast like a cord” – only to be “drowned out” by “the wind’s skirl / and the flint of the road.” The collection follows this model,
offering push-pull of hope, endurance, and only occasional peace with the battering of the world as it is. The first section of the book seeks “to wake” from the despair of loss, and, conversely, to find respite in elusive sleep, where “self is all you want / to lose.” The speaker of “Trying to Sleep in the Butterfly Room” has lost a daughter, possibly due to drowning. The second section widens its focus, encompassing both the son who survived and the speaker’s relationship with her own declining mother. This mother both waited for her daughter “to slip in the deep, to live” (in “City Pool”) and found it almost impossible to enjoy anything easily, living in “silences we found too true to bear” (“When Mama Smiled”). In “Gathering Fears,” the poet “fill[s her] pockets with nails / someone has tossed in the street / to ruin our tires, to wound our feet.” In “The Blue Silk Lounging Pajamas,” she invokes the memory of her mother’s pajamas, the ones that “grew dearer and dearer, being lost” as emblems of the things we fear and those we cherish more closely when we lose them. This section introduces the motif of dust – dust which both obscures a photograph memory and allows the speaker to recall the scent of a lover’s pillow in “Dissonance of Dust on This Old Sunrise Photo: A Triptych.” This dust both clouds and shines in “Youth” as the speaker’s younger self spins a convertible around an empty field: stirring a cloud of dust so high the sun shone through, gilt-edged, and you so young this could go on and on, the tilt of the car, the way you soared into and over the dust to find that clear sky you were made of.