North Carolina Literature in a Global Context
Immersion in another language here serves as magical “incantation,” and travel connects with the stream of life leading forward, escaping the impulse so often found in the tourist’s attempt to arrest time, to capture and preserve something of the past in material repositories:
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and seems content with whatever boon might be visited upon him. What signifies is his willingness to join in the family of man and to humbly submit himself to its rituals: Almost everyone, old and young, removes a golden tallow, pays and parts
Journeying is more
to the sandy plot where prayers
than a visitation:
are planted, sometimes answered,
charm of sight and smell beyond language or cameras framing for memory and trinkets jangling as trophies of having been. Nine months after we got home, words of wool, incantations of milk became flesh: Hay-fields splayed in our minds against the white and blue of the delivery room the last crossing of the impressionist’s oil.
“Cross Fertilization” offers perhaps Radavich’s most sanguine expression of faith in the value of travel and its opening of doors to richer, more vital living. But even when he confronts the cultural differences that prevent the traveler from achieving the fully immersive experience he seeks, Radavich articulates faith in the effort. The speaker of these poems is no Prufrock fixated on his own alienation. Even in a poem like “Saint Spyridon,” in which the speaker visiting the Greek shrine wonders, “Why, exactly, do they kiss / these bones?” and gawks at the “miniature portraits of madonnas / and saints” and the “line of believers” who kneel beneath the “gold leaf that dances overhead,” Radavich refuses to indulge in cynicism or even to be too much troubled by his own doubts. Rather, he goes through the motions of religious inspiration and supplication with the other pilgrims
DAVID RADAVICH is the author of several collections of poetry, and individual works have appeared widely in journals and anthologies. His poetry honors include the Mid-America Prize in 2012 and the Paul &
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always voiced in thoughts icons tease to consciousness: seeking to draw out through the mouth to mumbling and the light of day beside a place where bones have lain for centuries, they say, and saved this city from catastrophe – if lips keep demons away.
The wry understatement of the concluding line, underscored by the rhyme, prevents the poem from lapsing into mysticism or superstition at the same time that it places hope in language, in the act of communion through communication, which has bound together for “centuries” those who have visited the shrine and shared a faith. A number of the poems in this volume chronicle the grueling journey through cancer and chemotherapy. In “Way of All Flesh,” the cancer patient, exiled from the land of the healthy, reflects, How good it must be to love your body. To feel at ease there, as in the shadowed cathedral of Toledo perhaps – where believers arrive and light their golden candles.
“Way of All Flesh” might have easily turned to bitterness or self-loathing, but instead the gentle spirit behind the verses takes us to a place of self-acceptance and communion with the healthy body of a lover, whom he visits “like a Martian / longing to measure every scent.” The rituals of daily life and love return the diseased speaker from these fantastical landscapes that embody his otherness to the faith that
Zelda Gitlin Prize in 2012 and 2014. He is currently Vice President of the North Carolina Poetry Society and Poetry Editor of Deus Loci. He lives in Charlotte, NC.