120
2015
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
Shelby Stephenson’s The Hunger of Freedom marks the tenth full-length collection of poems by a writer who, like Avery, recently completed a distinguished career in the University of North Carolina system. As Professor of English at UNC Pembroke, Stephenson published widely and served as editor of the literary journal Pembroke Magazine from 1979 to 2010. During his tenure, it featured the work of many of North Carolina’s literary giants, alongside internationally recognized writers like Seamus Heaney, Barbara Guest, and Robert Pinsky. In contrast to the journal’s international reach, Stephenson’s poetry hews close in language and subject matter to the Johnson County homeplace where he still lives. And in contrast to Avery’s urbane wit and Latin-inflected diction, Stephenson is resolutely regional, unmistakably Southern. Much like Thomas McGuane’s short stories of the American West, which initiate the unfamiliar reader to a culture as much by lexical as by descriptive means, Stephenson’s vocabulary situates The Hunger of Freedom in North Carolina. Thus, dogs don’t give birth but “find babies,” boards are “froed” rather than riven, and older folks chew “the goozle,” or windpipe, of a slaughtered hog to suck out its sweet marrow. Rather than isolate the South, however, Stephenson’s poems distinguish themselves by the diversity of the approaches they take to the stories they tell and by the strength of their commitment to what Stephenson refers to, in one poem, as the “entanglements” of genealogy. Stephenson’s Bellday Poetry Prize–winning 2008 collection, Family Matters: Homage to July, the Slave Girl, considered the genealogical shame of having slaveholding ancestors. In selecting the book for the Bellday Prize, Allen Grossman compared Family Matters to the artistic interventions made by such historically invested writers as Susan Howe and James Agee. His citation for the award praises the poems’ “strenuous questioning – and exposure – of the fictions of ownership, whether of persons or places, graves or farms.”6 Against a Southern poetic tradition that would defend its territory and customs against all opposition, Stephenson’s willingness to remember even the indefensible aspects of family history
By allowing a family member’s story to memorialize the dead implicitly, Ammons allows the levity of recollection to shade, but not entirely conceal, the gravitas of death. And by concealing an elegy within a found poem, he manages to break with formality without losing the emotional impact the more conventional genre, the formal elegy, often boasts. Avery’s “Dealing with It” takes its cues from Ammons’s poem in that it, too, veils its mourning in lighthearted, but ultimately transparent comedy. Avery, however, elegantly reverses Ammons’s plot. Instead of arriving too late, the speaker has stayed too long after his mother’s funeral and has been subjected to “a prolix uncle” delivering a polemic against technology. (Coincidentally, Southern writers since the Fugitives have been acquainted with the theme): “Used to, I could fix damn near anything” – .... “Nowadays it’s a damn sight different. Say your washer/dryer breaks, you gotta call Des Moines to get a number in Atlanta for ’em to fax somebody over from Santa Fe to fix it. You can stay sane living like that, even be entertained, as long as you appreciate how many folks got jobs rejuvenatin’ the stuff – and have a washpot to use while you wait.”
Read by itself, the last line of the poem takes on a double meaning, such that the speaker, in response to his mother’s death, can, in Roland Barthes’s words, “do no more than await [his] total, undialectical death.”5 But if Barthes’s tone reflects an inconsolable grief, “Dealing With It” presents a speaker who can, after his mother’s death, “stay sane” and perhaps “even be entertained” by accepting, in both its literal and figurative senses, the new economy. And it is this, Avery’s capacity for seeding ordinary life with insight into the profound, that accounts for both the irresistible force and the utter readability of Mountain Gravity.
5
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981) 72.
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6
Quoted from the website for Bellday Books.