North Carolina Literature in a Global Context
MAPPING THE UNKNOWN SELF a review by George Hovis Joseph Bathanti. Concertina: Poems. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2013. David Radavich. The Countries We Live In: Poems. Charlotte, NC: Main Street Rag, 2014.
GEORGE HOVIS is an Associate Professor of English at SUNY College at Oneonta. A native to North Carolina, he earned his PhD in English from UNC Chapel Hill. He has published short fiction and literary criticism on Southern writers in various venues and is the author of Vale of Humility: Plain Folk in Contemporary North Carolina Fiction (University of South Carolina Press, 2007). See his article on Fred Chappell in NCLR 2011, his essay “Ten North Carolina Stories That Ought to be Films” in NCLR 2012, and his interview with Wiley Cash in NCLR 2013.
Two recent volumes by North Carolina poets depart familiar terrain of the state’s landscape and literature. Whereas David Radavich’s The Countries We Live In visits locations throughout the US, Europe, and beyond, seeking an expansive consciousness through global travel, Joseph Bathanti’s Concertina goes behind the razor wire of North Carolina prisons to peer into lives that may feel as otherworldly as those of another continent. David Radavich, who has served as President of the Thomas Wolfe Society and produced some of the most important recent criticism on Wolfe, follows in the footsteps of North Carolina’s first great literary globe trotter. Like Wolfe, in The Countries We Live In, Radavich mines personal memory of travels abroad to meditate on universal human experience. In these poems, which seek extension of the self through immersion in other cultures and other selves, travel is considered the perpetual state of our existence. The volume opens with an aubade, set in an indeterminate tourist destination, or possibly merely the restaurant district of one’s own neighborhood – in either case, a location where human labor conspires with the sun and the turning earth to offer the paying traveler all the glories of another day. In characteristically chiseled images and short lines, Radavich describes this feast for the senses:
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hips by like signposts.
From these particularized images, the perspective progressively expands to take in the universal and sacramental experience of daily starting over: Food will again enter bodies, breaths will gather air the way gases swirled before astronomy ached in the aerosphere.
Like Whitman, in “Every Day the World Starts Again,” Radavich connects the quotidian to the cosmic, calling our attention to the repeated miracle of life. The volume’s final poem serves as a bookend to its opening. In “Salut,” we are reminded that the apparently endless, cyclic journey of human life does indeed have an endpoint, from which the time between hello and goodbye will appear remarkably brief. After pondering the extremes of human creativity: on the one hand, “poems, paintings / . . . dancers that swirl / into infinity,” and, on the other hand, “corpses, condoms, / drug paraphernalia, polystyrene,” the omniscient speaker muses, What a species this was that came and went like a comet,
A shopkeeper hoists baskets with a pole, a waiter
tail not so very long
polishes silver teapots
and blazing off
wearing gloves, with its special dust a thin smoker in high heels swings
101
into the galaxy.