Writing Toward Healing
substituted for “curb”: “Back to the street, he walks ahead, my black purse still swinging. / Watch the ledge, Mom.” That island. Both Winters and Powell possess a keen eye for observing and describing nature. Winters’s volume includes more than one poem about an island, and one of these, an unrhymed sonnet, is called “Sherkin Island,” which lies in Roaringwater Bay (the title of the previous poem in the collection), southwest of County Cork, Ireland. It is accessible via a short ferry ride from Baltimore, a fishing village, and that’s where this largely descriptive poem begins: “We leave the ferryman, walk the path.” There are obviously two people in the poem, but the identity of the second person is not clear. Winters’s book is divided into two sections; this poem is included in the second, which mostly deals with family members, so it is likely that the second person is a family member. The poem provides a rich, detailed description of the small island: “Stone-stacked walls fill the horizon. / Trailing honeysuck-
les rove through hedgerows. / Hart’s Tongue grows. Marsh orchids bow.” The poem is largely descriptive, so the action consists of typical things people might do on an outing: pick flowers, eat wild berries, watch birds, collect shells. The details, however, are rendered in musical, charged language: “Blackbacked gulls, terns, choughs / drift on the wind. Puffins cling to a cliff. / We watch harbor seals roil in the waves.” The alliteration of “Black-backed” and “cling to a cliff” provides a perfect mating of sound and sense, evoking the restless activity of the wind and waves captured in the well-chosen verb “roil.” The poem ends with the speaker collecting oyster shells on the strand, looking “for the silver shine. / Over and over again, we are one,” the speaker concludes, expressing the momentary communal transcendence occasioned by a walk in nature. Powell’s poem about an island bears the evocative title “The Landscape of Before.” The island is not named, though we are told, “Once the island bore a
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name, spoken here / and there, inked on ancient maps.” The poem has six long lines, giving it the appearance of a brief prose poem, and like many prose poems, it has a mystical, evanescent, fairytale quality. Like Winters’s poem, Powell’s is highly descriptive: “Wind sang through pines. Lopsided moon. Water rushing between / her fingers as if it had lost its way.” The island possesses a strong, almost mystical appeal for the speaker: “She loved this island.” The poem is a dreamlike memory, as the title suggests, a long-lost landscape, a never-never land, faintly remembered from a time “before” – what? Adulthood, with all its losses, concessions, and surrenders, perhaps? At any rate, the island, and all it represents, remain a tantalizing, shimmering memory as the speaker concludes: “Sometimes, in her sleep, she tastes / those days, like something purple and wild that clustered near the shore.” It is a pleasure to immerse oneself in these two satisfying, graceful, and elegant collections and the worlds they create. n
James Applewhite Poetry Prize $250 and publicaton in NCLR
SUBMISSION PERIOD: MARCH 15–APRIL 30
2021 Final Judge: Catherine Carter Submission guidelines here No submission fee / Subscription required to submit