56
2021
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
THE BATTLE OF RELATIONSHIPS THROUGH DIFFERENT EYES a review by Jim Clark Dannye Romine Powell. In the Sunroom with Raymond Carver. Press 53, 2020. Sandra Ann Winters. Do Not Touch. Salmon Poetry, 2020.
JIM CLARK is Professor Emeritus of English at Barton College in Wilson, NC, where he was the Elizabeth H. Jordan Professor of Southern Literature and served as Dean of the School of Humanities. Some of his honors include the Randall Jarrell Scholarship, the Harriette Simpson Arnow Short Story Award, and the Merrill Moore Writing Award. He served as the President of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association in 2015 and Chair of the North Carolina Writers Conference in 2017. DANNYE ROMINE POWELL is the author of five poetry collections, two of which received the BrockmanCampbell Award for the best book of poetry published by a North Carolinian in the previous year. In the Sunroom with Raymond Carver won the 2020 Roanoke-Chowan Award. Hear her award acceptance here. She has also been awarded fellowships in poetry from the NEA, the North Carolina Arts Council, and Yaddo. A resident of Charlotte, NC, she is the longtime book editor of the Charlotte Observer.
Here we have two new collections of poems by North Carolina poets: Do Not Touch, by Sandra Ann Winters, and In the Sunroom with Raymond Carver, by Dannye Romine Powell. Asked to review these two books, I first pondered whether they were assigned to me randomly, or with some thought to their pairing. I do not know the answer, but at the risk of violating the old proscription against revealing “how the sausage gets made,” I’ll share my notes from my first reading of both books: Mothers and fathers, wives and husbands, who were once daughters and sons of other mothers and fathers, now gone to dust, their deaths remembered, replayed, and commemorated. Children, their pleasures and pains. The pines, the moon, the wind, the flowers, that island . . . Well, enough of that, but one must begin somewhere. A simple survey of content, of subject matter, though, is the easy part. What about style? There’s the rub. The first thing that struck me, stylistically, about these poets is their elegance, and I employ that term in both its aesthetic and scientific dimensions: both poets write with a pleasingly graceful and very satisfying simplicity of style. There are differences, however, to which the fact that Winters’s book was published by Salmon Press, which has been
“Publishing Irish and International Poetry Since 1981,” provides a clue. Winters was until recently a professor of Irish and English literature and at least a couple of her poems contain notes claiming W.B. Yeats as an influence. Like those of Yeats, and perhaps another Irish favorite, Patrick Kavanagh, Winters’s poems are sturdy, earthy, but also lovely and musical. Thinking of that note of earthiness, and their various references to Irish things and places, I was tempted to say that her poems possess a “provincial elegance.” Although “provincial” has become, for some, a pejorative term, this life-long dweller of the rural American South doesn’t see it this way. Was Yeats provincial? I would certainly say he was, and also sophisticated and cosmopolitan. Perhaps you could substitute “vernacular” for “provincial” if my argument fails to convince you. Powell’s poems, by contrast, possess an equally delightful urbanity. Like the great and sadly departed American poet William Matthews, Powell writes simply and elegantly of the pains and pleasures of being human. But beneath that simplicity and elegance lies a vast reservoir of cultural knowledge and experience that infuses every well-chosen word, every beautifully crafted line. And so, back to subject matter. To come to a better appreciation of these
SANDRA ANN WINTERS served as a pProfessor of English and Irish Studies at Guildford College in Greensboro, NC, from 1989 to her retirement in 2011. She lives part of the year in Millstreet, County Cork, Ireland, where she spends time reading, writing, and presenting workshops and readings.
OPPOSITE Sandra Ann Winters reading
for NCLR at Malaprop’s Bookstore in Asheville, NC, 14 Aug. 2010