54
2013
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
number 22
Photographs by Peat Burnett
gone but not forgotten: reminiscences of family, home, love, and loss a review by Melissa Edmundson Makala Sally Rosen Kindred. No Eden. Bay City, MI: Mayapple Press, 2011. John Thomas York. Cold Spring Rising. Winston-Salem, NC: Press 53, 2012.
melissa edmundson makala earned her MA in English from ECU in 2002 and while at ECU served as Assistant Editor of NCLR. She completed her PhD in English at the University of South Carolina in 2007 and currently teaches at USC-Aiken, where she specializes in nineteenthand twentieth-century British literature. Sally Rosen Kindred was born and raised in Greensboro, NC, and is a graduate of Duke Univeristy, where she held the Margaret Rose Knight Stanford Scholarship in Creative Writing. She has received fellowships from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and her poems have appeared in Best News Poets 2009, Quarterly West, and storySouth. She has taught poetry writing at the University of Maryland, the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, and for the Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth. Read samples of her poetry in NCLR 2011. John Thomas York was born in WinstonSalem, grew up in Yadkin County, and now lives in Greensboro, NC. He has an MFA from UNC– Greensboro and has taught English in public schools for over thirty years. His poem “Lamp” received the first James Applewhite Poetry Prize and was published in NCLR 2012. (Hear him read his winning poem.) His poems have also appeared in anthologies such as Word and Witness: 100 Years of North Carolina Poetry and The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume III: Contemporary Appalachia.
No Eden is a fitting title for Sally Rosen Kindred’s first full-length collection of poetry, set partly in the rural landscape of western North Carolina. Scattered throughout the collection are bleak images of the biblical flood, isolated children, barren women, distant mothers, and an Old Testament God who metes out punishment more than he comforts or rewards. Several poems in the collection also deal with a daughter’s difficult relationship with her emotionally unstable and distant mother and how that relationship is transfigured into the hopes and fears of generations of women. In the poem sequence, “Seven Sorrows,” individual female experience is blended with the thoughts of biblical personae such as Lilith, Eve, Miriam, and the Virgin Mary. One of the most effective images in the sequence involves an unnamed mother and daughter in “Eve on the Far Shore.” First, as the daughter, “almost forty,” sits by her mother’s bedside in a hospital: . . . She wants to pick me up from school, back twenty-five years. Give me the keys, cries her face into mine. My girl’s waiting for me. Tanks of breath roll by dangling hoses, thump and hiss. In a schoolyard somewhere, bushes turn gray. She’s waiting for me. We both know she is.
This image is revisited later in the section called “Miriam, Just Out of Egypt,” when readers see a little girl waiting to be picked up after school, knowing yet not wanting to acknowledge that her mother is nowhere near. Instead, the mother is “Miles off” and “drifts amnesiac on a black couch, keys / in her pocketbook zipped tight . . . / . . . Could she still / be breathing?” The poem ends with the girl facing this bitter reality: “Right now / I know two things: I love her more than anyone / and I will never be hurt again, which means / my body will stay empty as this gray drive.” The last section of this poem, titled “Mary, Full of Grace,” is particularly powerful in its unapologetic bleakness, as the speaker compares her