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2021
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
PHOTOGRAPH BY SYLVIA FREEMAN
LESSONS IN PERSISTENCE a review by Anna McFadyen Kay Bosgraaf. The Fence Lesson: Poems. Kelsay Books, 2019. Patricia Hooper. Wild Persistence: Poems. University of Tampa Press, 2019.
The latest poetry collections by Kay Bosgraaf and Patricia Hooper invite readers to pay attention to what William Wordsworth calls "the still, sad music of humanity” that contributes to “the joy of elevated thoughts” and allows us to “see into the life of things.” Whether escaping into natural splendors, processing friction between family members, or transcending the world in an airplane, Bosgraaf and Hooper contend with the keenest observers in our state. Both are Michigan natives who have made North Carolina home, and their books complement each other thematically. These birds of passage narrate lives traveled through and grieved through, as vistas of wisdom open to them in maturity. They do not shy from grim subjects, yet they celebrate the gift of human experience that must not be rejected simply because it is difficult. Their penetrating diction and poignant storytelling evoke the words of fellow Midwesterner Mary Oliver: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief. / What a time they have, these two / housed as they are in the same body.”1 Unlike Oliver, who is typically effervescent outdoors, these poets admit doubt in the face of nature’s solace. Their landscapes may harbor snakes, but mankind proves the more dangerous animal. In Hooper’s “Copperhead,” the coiled “rope of silk” has dignity and beauty, a creature as fundamentally innocent as the nearby garter snake
ANNA MCFADYEN, a resident of Raleigh, NC, received her MA in English Literature from NC State University and her BA in English from Meredith College, where she served as a chief coeditor of The Colton Review and was a Norma Rose scholar. Her graduate research focused on English Romanticism in the context of natural history, as well as on young adult literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She has reviewed for NCLR since 2018 and was a semifinalist in the 2020 James Applewhite Poetry Prize competition. KAY BOSGRAAF lives in Durham, NC, and grew up in Hudsonville, MI. Her previous works include Song of Serenity: Poems (University of Tampa Press, 2005), which was one of three winners in a competition sponsored by Northwoods Journal, and a chapbook, Blue Eyes and Homburg Hats (Presa Press, 2018). She has had a long career teaching at several colleges, including Montgomery College in Maryland, where she is Professor Emerita. She received a MacDowell Colony residency in 2016 and has held two residencies at the Vermont Studio Center. PATRICIA HOOPER, a resident of Gastonia, NC, and native of Saginaw, MI, has published four previous books of poetry, a chapbook, and four children’s books. Her poems have appeared in American Scholar, Poetry, Atlantic Monthly, Southern Review, Ploughshares, and New Criterion, as well as other journals and anthologies. She has received numerous prizes, including the Norma Farber First Book Award of the Poetry Society of America, the Roanoke Chowan Award for Poetry from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Society, and the Writer’s Community Residency Award from the National Writer’s Voice. 1
From William Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour; 13 July 1798"; Mary Oliver’s ” We Shake with Joy” is in Evidence (Beacon, 2009) 13.