74
2014
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
In Colony Collapse Disorder and The Broken Flower we have strong, assured collections from two of North Carolina’s most original poetic voices, Keith Flynn and Jeffery Beam. In addition to being fine poets and careful craftsmen, Flynn and Beam are also tireless proponents of the art of poetry and generous advocates for their fellow poets, especially those who reside in North Carolina. It is a testament to the diversity of poetry in the writer-rich state of North Carolina that these two poets, while most assuredly native sons, are neither what one might expect to find if one were to go looking for an exemplar of a “Southern poet.” Though Flynn’s and Beam’s poetic voices are distinctive and quite dissimilar, their new collections share some intriguing similarities. For one, both men are musicians – they speak often of music; critics, reviewers, and fellow poets reach for words like “singer,” “song,” “blues,” and “gospel” to describe them; and in person, they are just as likely to sing a poem as say it. So the spirit of music informs and inhabits these poems. They are both “regional” poets, in the sense that they continue to live in a specific place (the mountains of Western North Carolina for Flynn, and the Piedmont for Beam) and vigorously enact Wendell Berry’s elegant definition of regionalism, “local life aware of itself”;1 and yet the span of their poetry is markedly global. Indeed, Flynn’s book is described on its back cover as “a geopolitical abecedarium,” and Beam’s poems borrow inspiration from Rilke, the French
“The Cruel Radiance of What Is” a review by Jim Clark Jeffery Beam. The Broken Flower: Poems. Nottingham, England: Skysill Press, 2012. Keith Flynn. Colony Collapse Disorder. San Antonio, TX: Wings Press, 2013.
JIM Clark is Chair of the Department of English, Modern Languages, Religion, and Philosophy at Barton College in Wilson, NC. He received his MFA from UNC-Greensboro and his PhD from the University of Denver. He is the author of two books of poems, Dancing on Canaan’s Ruins (Eternal Delight Productions, 1997) and Handiwork (St. Andrews Press, 1998), and has also released two solo CDs, Buried Land (Eternal Delight Productions, 2003) and The Service of Song (Eternal Delight Productions, 2010).
1
Wendell Berry, A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972) 65.
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Cathars, and a Japanese woodcut and transport us to France and Italy. And finally and perhaps most important, both books are artfully and elegantly structured. Flynn lays out the organizational pattern of his collection in his “Preface,” describing it as “a place-based abecedarium in which each letter of the alphabet is represented by two places, cities, countries, or regions whose name corresponds to the letter and its assigned poem.” Also alluded to as structural referents are the beehive, the Mayan calendar, and the fiftytwo weeks of the year (given that there are twenty-six letters of the alphabet, each represented by two poems, for a total of fifty-two poems). Beam’s book contains numerous epigraphs, a “Poem of Preface,” followed by two titled sections, and ends with a witty, autobiographical prose “Postscript.” Both books are also wellmade artifacts, Flynn’s from the San Antonio, Texas-based Wings Press (a new press for him) and Beam’s from Skysill Press, in Nottingham, England. Many of us are by now familiar with the phrase “colony collapse disorder,” and have some interest in the continuing fate of the world’s honeybee population, which has been precipitously declining since at least 2006. As the biosphere’s primary pollinators, honeybees are absolutely essential to the food chain, and thus essential to our survival. In his preface to his book Colony Collapse Disorder, Keith Flynn chronicles this “terrifying apocalypse” of honeybees and concludes,