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his sense that the care and humanity people extend represent the truly divine. The last section, titled “The Widower’s Tongue,” brings these themes together in twenty-one poems speaking directly and painfully of the deep grief that consumes Silverthorne after Sylvia’s death. “Maybe the lightning bug is you,” he says to her, “come back to be with me.” The
blue-gray herons, “winged gods of prayer / and meditation,” look for “the goodness that comes up / from the Earth’s soul.” Cardinals, hummingbirds, Shackleford Bank wild horses, crying crepe myrtles, and especially the butterfly that is Sylvia waiting for Silverthorne to join her in their eternal butterfly dance turn the aching forlornness, the “grief settle[d] in the bones” that Sil-
Winter 2023
verthorne so powerfully portrays, into a resurrection. Following the Sylvia poems, “Hwy 125 North of Doodle Hill & Hwy 33 East of Chocowinity,” reprinted from his 2015 collection Holy Ghosts of Whiskey, shares Silverthorne’s directions to his survivors: “Bury me here / at the end of the stubbled rows / beyond the golden soybeans / and fields blanketed with cot-
Early in November, 2022, sad news began to spread within North Carolina’s literary community. As described by a post from the North Carolina Writers’ Network, The news of Philip Gerard’s death was the kind of shock that tempts you to think it can’t possibly be true. His vitality was of a kind that seemed irreducible and essential. Philip was indeed essential to North Carolina’s literary community, playing so many fundamental roles for so long that it became hard to remember he hadn’t always been here.
The Network’s posting reminded us that this North Carolina literary icon was “[b]orn and educated in Delaware.” He “came to the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and founded the MFA in Creative Writing program there. His novel Cape Fear Rising was one of the first attempts to reveal the truth of the 1898 Wilmington coup, for which he faced considerable backlash in his adopted state and city.”1 “Write what you really want to find out about,” is one of innumerable writing tips often shared by the much-mourned professor.2 He certainly followed that advice when he began writing Cape Fear Rising, inspired by learning that the North Carolina town he had just moved to was the site of the only successful coup d’etat in US history. As he said on the occasion of receiving the North Carolina Award for Literature, “I believe in the writer as a witness to evil, as a reporter of injustice, as a chronicler of human compassion . . . as one whose skills
1
2
”Philip Gerard, Teacher & Friend,” NC Writers’ Network Blog 8 Nov. 2022: web. Qtd. from Jill Gerard, “In Memoriam: Revered Author, UNCW Professor Philip Gerard to Be Celebrated This Month,” Port City Daily 3 Dec. 2022: web.
COURTESY OF NORTH CAROLINA DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL AND CULTURAL RESOURCES
“WE’VE ALL LOST A CHAMPION”: PHILIP GERARD (1955–2022)
illuminate the Truth with a capital T.”3 Illuminating that dark chapter of his new hometown did not make him popular there, but he would not be intimidated by those who would have liked to silence him, maybe even get him out of Wilmington, and he continued to write toward democratic ideals. Read his op-ed essay on removing Confederate monuments from government property as just one fine example.4
3
“Acceptance Remarks by Philip Gerard,” NCLR Online 2020: 85.
4
Philip Gerard, “Some Confederate Statues Should Be Taken Down,” StarNews Online 23 June 2020: web.