Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues
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PHOTOGRAPH BY BENITA VAN WINKLE
EVERYDAY SORROWS AND NECESSARY JOYS a review by Valerie Nieman Terri Kirby Erickson. Becoming the Blue Heron. Winston Salem, NC: Press 53, 2017.
Read about VALERIE NIEMAN with her poem published in this issue. The NCLR editorial staff is grateful to writers like her who give back after their books are reviewed and their works published in our pages by reviewing for us. TERRI KIRBY ERICKSON is the author of five full-length collections published by Press 53. Erickson’s poetry has also appeared in American Life in Poetry, Asheville Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, Christian Science Monitor, Journal of the American Medical Association, Literary Mama, NASA News & Notes, Poet’s Market, storySouth, The Writer’s Almanac, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and NCLR, among other publications. Awards and honors include the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, Nazim Hikmet Award, Atlanta Review International Publication Prize, Nautilus Silver Book Award, Poetry for Their Freedom Award, and the Leidig Lectureship in Poetry. She is a member of the North Carolina Writers Conference, the North Carolina Poetry Society and the North Carolina Writers’ Network.
In her fifth poetry collection, Becoming the Blue Heron, Terri Kirby Erickson returns to familiar territory – the complexities of family, the consolations of nature, and human happiness in all its fragility. “Lightning Bugs” opens the collection with a memory of childhood, seen by the light of “little sparks from the earth’s / fiery core, dusk’s tiny lanterns.” Parents sip Tom Collins, and children run safely across mown lawns until they fall exhausted. A memory such as this, unshadowed by loss or regret, can tread into the soft ground of nostalgia, but for every poem that goes down sweet as coconut cake, many have the iron bitterness of pain and loss. We might, in fact, turn to the poem that centers the book, “Nostalgia,” to see how it echoes major notes sounded through this collection: The past is a set of white curtains, a window nailed shut beyond which everyone is happy. There is no death, no disillusionment. No one is sick. My parents’ faces are filled with light, as if their minds are made of birthday candles, never blown out.
In her lovely poem “Washing Dishes,” Erickson honors the evening ritual of her aging parents, whose hands may not be sure, but whose long life together is. Her mother soaps and rinses a glass, “Then she passes it to my father, who has / so little feeling in his knotty fingers that a glass could / be a bubble for all he knows.” Later, she closely observes her father, with his damaged eyes and hands, cutting her mother’s hair. Who could wish for more than what they have, already? I can see clearly, the perfect
ABOVE RIGHT Terri Kirby Erickson reading at Historic Broyhill, Clemmons, NC, Apr. 2014
body of my childhood – the girl with black hair who runs and jumps with ease,