North Carolina Literature in a Global Context
THE EVER-CHANGING FIELD a review by Sarah Huener Becky Gould Gibson. Heading Home. Charlotte, NC: Main Street Rag, 2014.
SARAH HUENER is a writer and musician from North Carolina. She studied poetry as an undergraduate at UNC Chapel Hill and recently received her MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University. She has also traveled in Croatia and Israel as a Robert Pinsky Global Fellow. Her honors include being a finalist for the 2014 Pocataligo Poetry Contest and a Pushcart Prize nomination. Her poems have been published in Four Way Review and Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and are forthcoming in The Southern Poetry Anthology’s North Carolina volume (Texas Review Press). With a PhD from UNC Chapel Hill, BECKY GOULD GIBSON taught literature, writing, and Women’s Studies, mostly at Guilford College in Greensboro, NC, where she was a member of the faculty for twenty years before retiring in 2008. She has since served two terms as Gilbert Chappell Distinguished Poet for the Central District (2009–2011) and is a member of the Forsyth County Historic Resources Commission. She has published two prizewinning chapbooks of poetry and three full-length collections, including the X.J. Kennedy Prize-winning book Aphrodite’s Daughter (Texas Review Press, 2008; reviewed in NCLR 2008). Heading Home won the inaugural Lena M. Shull Book Contest in 2013, after the collection’s title poem won the 2012 William Matthews Prize from the Asheville Poetry Review.
Becky Gould Gibson’s latest book, Heading Home, is a varied and fresh collection by a veteran North Carolina poet who handles memory delicately by representing internal and external landscapes. Gibson’s language is carefully wrought, her poems paced to effectively enact experiences of childhood, family, and love. Her nature poems are not like nature poems you’ve read before. Nature is often the occasion for a poem, but Gibson pushes beyond mere description, mining her imaginative material for deeper, unexpected resonances, as in “Summer Solstice in Pastels”: “Field of cows, field of the painting. / Can we ever see anything as it is with the field always changing?” In Gibson’s processing of human experience, past and future blur and overlap. In the standout poem “Scuppernongs,” the speaker remembers “all those summers, / you in another county, nearly a decade before we would meet” and feels all too acutely the inevitable separation of death: “To be alone as I was that distant August, / memory plucking the fruit of you, scuppernong ripe in my mouth.” This poem displays the mastery of line and image present in the author’s best poems, its natural images acting as the shuttle that weaves between internal and external, past, present, and future, carrying the thread of our attention along with it. Pleasure is central to the poems in this book, and the mélange of intellectual and physical satisfaction leaves the reader unsure which is more enjoyable: the sensations themselves, or Gibson’s descriptions of them. Heading Home is intelligently structured, with the more pastoral, reflective poems found in the first and last sections, bookending the
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more fanciful middle sections. In the heart of the book, Gibson enacts various dialogues with the past, including figures from Plato and Socrates to Churchill and Christiane Amanpour, Saint Augustine and Saint Paul to Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. At times the heavily populated middle poems can seem capricious; one wonders why these particular figures were chosen, and sometimes the formal homages fall short of the success of Gibson’s personal narrative poems. However, the imaginative action is impressive, and the poems in the central sections bring a tonal range to the book. The final section of the book returns to the arena of nature and memory from the opening poems, but with an added air of familiarity and expectation. The poem “Sycamore, Late November” begins, “At last – I’ve waited. At last – you’re naked, / of green divested, rid of leaves, large-veined.” The intimacy of language and content shows the speaker as herself rooted but aware of and at peace with the changes taking place. This movement from patience to identification and discovery recalibrates our ear after the middle two sections, placing us once more in Gibson’s more contemplative vein. Seasonally marked poems progress sequentially; the book embraces a cyclical movement on both a large scale and, ultimately, a smaller scale with the sequence that closes the final section. Heading Home finishes with a remarkable royal crown of sonnets, a sequence of Gibson’s own invention. The sonnets follow the growth of a fetus, each taking its first line from the last line of the previous sonnet, with the last sonnet bringing closed the crown by taking one line from each of