124
2015
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
number 24
PHOTOGRAPH BY RICHARD MCGEE (RBMCGEEPORTRAITS.COM)
the previous sonnets. Clearly conceived and well executed, the sequence veers at times into the sentimental (“Some say the world is fallen. Here you’re safe”), at others into the sublime (“your face a mask of polished gold / for masquerade or funeral”). The most intimate moments are unassuming and lovely: “we know you’re a girl, will be a woman. / Will hook a bra without looking.” These instances echo poets like Alan Shapiro observing his young daughter look at herself in the mirror after a shower, foreshadowing womanhood: She holds her breath to keep the belly flat as she can get it before she breathes out as her self again, and laughs.”1
The temporality shown by trees, reeds, and flowers in earlier poems is in Gibson’s collection present in a very specific human future. In the strongest moments of her book, Gibson successfully captures the strange duality of observing the cyclical decline and renewal of nature, finding change as a truth about humanity. Her light touch and careful balance are reminiscent of Michael Chitwood, another North Carolina poet writing with a keen ear to natural seasons as ways of expressing human experience: everyone going about their business as if seed and seedtime were not swarming.2
The closing sonnets of Heading Home are a fitting bridge between the natural and human: Marrow’s busy fashioning blood – to become rivers, tributaries, streams, stream-lets, creeks, brooks, branches, on the map of your body’s landscape.
Physiologically accurate and formally committed, the sonnets don’t falter. Their framing is appropriate and generative. Momentum builds with the echoing lines, morphing and adding to what came before, just as the fetus grows and changes over time. The
end poem of the sequence wisely relaxes formal requirements to allow a coherent, graceful moment of closure. Leaving these sonnets for the end of the book renews interest with the close examination of a subject only touched on earlier in the collection. Heading Home projects the graceful assuredness of a mature writer dealing with the challenging landscapes of life. Versatile and intelligently conceived, these poems feel familiar in the best sense, comfortable without crossing into sheer anecdote. Gibson’s writing shows an intimate, reflexively illustrative relationship with nature, and this successful third book solidifies her place as an active figure in North Carolina’s literary scene. Keenly felt, yet compassionate and sometimes humorous, her work is unassuming and smart. Heading Home is a strong effort from a writer who understands the ebb and flow of life and appreciates the creative and philosophical potential of the written word. At times clever and funny, at other times quietly observant, Gibson is on par with some of our state’s best writers, and her latest effort is a journey to a place simultaneously past and present, looking toward future possibilities, calmly at home with the passage of time. n
1
ABOVE Becky Gould Gibson at a Poetry
2
Hickory reading and workshop, Hickory, NC, 9 Sept. 2014
Alan Shapiro, “Instruction,” Tantalus in Love (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005) 32. Michael Chitwood, “Moses,” Poor Mouth Jubilee (North Adams, MA: Tupelo Press, 2010) 74.