North Carolina Miscellany
Likewise, fans of Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris (1992), with its intimate dialogue between garden, creator, and creatures, would appreciate Hooper’s closing “Ode,” in which Hooper speaks directly to nature: I would like to thank you for your persistence, the way you begin a new life every April, the way you drop everything in a hurry, gold, ochre, brown . . .
Yet she stops herself, saying, There I go again making you sentient . . .
VOICE AND THE RELIABLE NARRATOR a review by Patrick Bizzaro Malaika King Albrecht. The Stumble Fields. Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2020. Michael Gaspeny. The Tyranny of Questions: Poems. Unicorn Press, 2020.
when what I admire most is your reticence, how you can be and not say.
The poet periodically draws a sharp contrast between her enjoyment of the garden’s quietude with terrorism elsewhere, as if asking why she is deserving of this peace and how long it will last. Even though these thoughts almost petrify her, Hooper returns in five poems to the indomitable mockingbird who “has to keep on singing, / to know he’s really here,” whether above a house of mourning or of joy. Similarly, Bosgraaf says the mockingbird sings the best he can, even in imitation, concluding, “Not / a bad way to live, I think.” These poets keep singing, too, in order to weather a dangerous world and to celebrate the beauty that contradicts its disasters. Hooper and Bosgraaf remain open to channels of delight – a gift to the rest of us. n
PATRICK BIZZARO has published twelve books and chapbooks of poetry; two critical studies of Fred Chappell’s work published by Louisiana State University Press (poetry in 1997 and fiction in 2004); a book with NCTE on the pedagogy of academic creative writing (2014); four textbooks; and numerous poems, essays, and reviews in magazines. He is on the editorial board of New Writing and Impost and is a contributing editor to Asheville Poetry Review. He has won the Madeline Sadin Award from NYQ and Four Quarters’ Poetry Prize as well as a Fulbright to South Africa in 2012 to assist in developing an English language literacy program and a writing center at University of the Free State. He is Professor Emeritus of English at East Carolina University.
N C L R ONLINE
173
Voice has come under scrutiny in writing studies over the past twenty years, in many ways to compensate for the relative lack of interest in persona. Perhaps Wayne C. Booth has said everything that needs to be said about persona in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961). But the two fine books under review here enable us to reconsider voice in productive ways. Michael Gaspeny’s newest collection of verse, The Tyranny of Questions, is a sequence of poems boldly told by employing voice in its nearness to persona. His female protagonist, Addie, is the person best positioned to tell the stories in this fine collection. After all, the poems recount intervals in Addie’s life as she grows into adulthood and approaches death. By narrating in a woman’s voice, Gaspeny offers a credible series of dilemmas that portray Addie’s growth in consciousness between 1933 and 1973. Crises of race, gender, and class serve as backdrop to her growing development as a troubled but conscientious citizen of the world. The only things we can be certain of are Addie’s convictions, in spite of her sometimes tragic awareness of herself as the liberal minority. She has many questions and finds her answers in her personal experiences. We might all find ourselves, in what we realize to be our dying moments, reflecting with moral uncertainty upon our lives, as Addie does in the book’s final poem, “I Died the Other Day, 1973”: “I always hoped to redeem my sins by a perfect death, / . . . But planning / your