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2015
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
a review by John Steen Laurence Avery. Mountain Gravity. Chapel Hill, NC: New Atlantic Media, 2013. Shelby Stephenson. The Hunger of Freedom. Princeton, NJ: Red Dashboard, 2014. JOHN STEEN is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at ECU, where he teaches, conducts research on twentiethcentury poetry in the Stuart Wright Collection of the J.Y. Joyner Library, and serves as an NCLR editorial board member.
1
Letter to Oskar Pollak, 26 Jan. 1904.
Read about North Carolina’s current Poet Laureate SHELBY STEPHENSON in the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame story in this issue.
It’s the rare book of poetry that demands to be read in the quiet of one’s own room and, to use W.B. Yeats’s phrase, “among school children,”2 but it’s a testament to Avery and Stephenson’s skill that Mountain Gravity and The Hunger of Freedom succeed as creative textbooks and devotionals.
Many readers will recognize the names of Laurence Avery and Shelby Stephenson, whose verse and critical prose have already graced the pages of NCLR. For those who missed their initial offerings, both of these books showcase poets who, though they hail from opposite ends of the state, transcribe the sounds of North Carolina’s past as they echo in its present. Because they aim for accuracy, some of these voices are bitter; many speak in dialect; a few, delightfully, aren’t even human. All told, they compose a powerful after-image of what Stephenson calls “the world as memory” and a presentiment of what Avery calls, in the words of a dying Cherokee woman, “the bright days ahead.” As this range of tones and times suggests, both Mountain Gravity and The Hunger of Freedom manage to instruct and to delight. Their careful renderings of some of the most painful scenes from the state’s early history – those of Cherokee removal and slavery – remind readers that literature serves, in Kafka’s words, as an “axe for the frozen sea within us.”1 On the other hand, in lyrics describing the grace of the natural environment and of rural livelihood, Avery and Stephenson suggest that the state’s unique beauty endears itself to a microscopic vision. By integrating their historical narratives with lyric meditations on vitality in the midst of transience, both books manage to appeal to personal and public concerns.
CAROLINA MOURNING; OR, STILL LIFE WITH SQUIRRELS
LAURENCE AVERY received his MA from the University of Michigan and his PhD from the University of Texas, then joined the faculty of the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC Chapel Hill. In 2006, he received the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association’s R. Hunt Parker Memorial Award for his significant contribution to North Carolina Literature, in particular, for his work on Paul Green, including the UNC Press editions A Southern Life: Letters of Paul Green, 1916–1981 (1994), The Paul Green Reader (1998; reviewed in NCLR 2000), and a scholarly edition of The Lost Colony (2001). See his essays on Green in NCLR 2009 and 2012 and his poetry in NCLR 2010 and 2013. His poems have also been published in Tar River Poetry, Sewanee Review, Pembroke Magazine, and Poetry Southeast.
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It is no surprise that Laurence Avery has written a book of statewide interest. Before his retirement as Professor of English at UNC Chapel Hill, he devoted a scholarly career to the work of North Carolina’s most famous playwright, Paul Green. Although Green is best known for the outdoor drama The Lost Colony, which has played continuously at Roanoke Island since 1937, he set most of his plays and stories in a fictional town called “Little Bethel,” which resembles the Harnett County of his birth, and he spent decades fighting for civil rights for the state’s most vulnerable citizens. When Avery defines his backyard garden and his family history as similar “postage stamps” of ground in Mountain Gravity, the impetus seems to come from Green; so, too, does Avery’s recurrent interest in justice, particularly as it pertains to Native American treaties violated by the US government. Rather than merely depict the past, however, Mountain Gravity toggles between past injury and the burgeoning life of the present. In this way, Avery recalls words Paul Green wrote in a 1947 letter to James Holly Hanford, which Avery
2
W.B. Yeats, “Among School Children,” (London: Macmillan, 1928) 55–60.
ABOVE RIGHT Laurence Avery (right) with Charles Frazier (center) and artist Lloyd Owle,
whose sculpture complemented Avery’s poem in NCLR 2013, at the celebration of the publication of this issue at Malaprop’s Bookstore and Cafe, Asheville, NC, 31 Aug. 2013