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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
having apparently witnessed the episode, but also having failed to do anything to stop it; as for her own response, the only “self-examination” she was capable of was a study of her acne in the bathroom mirror. Section four (also a double sonnet) tells another sad story from her youth: how a local white woman hit and killed with her sportscar an African American schoolgirl just off the school bus and then (despite a score of witnesses, mostly African American) was acquitted of the crime. Byer’s attitude toward herself recalls Seamus Heaney’s self-characterization in his long poem “Station Island”: confronted by the ghosts of friends, relatives, and others who had died in Northern Ireland’s sectarian violence, he berates himself for not taking a committed stance against such killings. In “Southern Fictions,” Byer similarly charges herself with a culpable passivity. Nowhere is this plainer than the sonnet of section five: When the feminist poet flew down from New York, I drove her to campus, an hour’s
number 22
feeling, but not giving herself over to it: after all, the result is not mortified silence but a sequence of sonnets, and masterfully turned sonnets at that. (Like the relationships of the family poems here to Byer’s previous work in that vein, a technical discussion of these sonnets and their relationship to the sonnet tradition would make another good critical essay.) Part III of Descent is a miscellany. It begins with “Over,” written after the fulfillment of her father’s wish that a crop duster distribute his ashes over his land. Byer then retreats to a delightful evocation of her farm childhood in “Blackberry Road,” in which she suggests that the ritual of blackberry picking was a more genuinely spiritual experience than church services, which were so dull as to put those in the back pews to sleep. To her, she makes clear in the next poem, “First Presbyterian,” they were positively agonizing. Along with these poems of youth are some in which Byer most confronts her age: here we find “Big Tease” (mentioned previously), a spring poem in which she calls herself
easy drive. We chatted all the way there,
. . . an old woman who knows
mostly politics. I liked her so much I shored
that the inkblot of sky on this page
up my courage and told her the work
of my daybook will soon begin fading,
those boys had done, the macho way they bragged, how no one had the nerve to say
because how can anyone, even Great
shut up. She misinterpreted my words,
Granddaddy Death, stay asleep
assuming I had suffered in the midst
amid so much awakening?
of bigotry, silently doing my very best to row against the tide. It sounded so good I kept quiet, ashamed to say I’d been no activist. That I’d done nothing, joined no protests, felt no guilt. Had seen no reason why I should.
The sonnet of the final, sixth section concludes with a second admission – one probably at least as difficult to make as the one above and all the more resonant because of the terrible honesty required to make it:
As Williams closes his poem, he declares that the descent leads to “a new awakening: / which is a reversal / of despair.” Taking a ruthlessly critical perspective on her own past, while also acknowledging her age and the no longer unthinkable prospect of her own death, Byer gives us poems so fiercely (and at times joyfully) alive that we have to count them as “a reversal / of despair.” May this “new awakening” last a long, long time. n
Does my voice shake when I read my verse outside the South, for fear I seem a dunce or worse? Yes, I’m ashamed to say. I’ve stood beside some famous poets and wished my words
angelou Also Inducted
could sound as if I came from somewhere else.
Byer knows her accent betrays her: the very sound of her speech marks her as belonging to a place where many still wave the battle flag of slaveholding secessionists. As in the previous sonnet, she tells us she is “ashamed.” Surely, though, in this investigation of an unjust past, including her own complacency within it, there is what Williams calls “a kind / of accomplishment, / a sort of renewal.” While she cannot relive her life in real history, she can relive it and examine it in memory, yielding to shame insofar as to admit the
NCLR congratulates Maya Angelou, too, on her induction into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. Angelou has lived in Winston-Salem, NC, since 1981. She has a lifetime appointment as the Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University. Provost Emeritus Edwin G. Wilson presented Angelou for induction at the ceremony, and poet Jaki Shelton Green read Angelou’s poem “Still I Rise” in her honor (Angelou was unable to attend). Read more on the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame website. n