Descent: Poems by Byer, Kathryn Stripling(November 5, 2012) Paperback

by Kathryn Stripling Byer

Navigating the dangerous currents of family and race, Kathryn Stripling Byer's sixth poetry collection confronts the legacy of southern memory and landscape, where too often ''it's safer to stay blind.''Beginning with ''Morning Train,'' a response to Georgia blues musician Precious Bryant, Byer sings her way through a search for identity, recalling the hardscrabble lives of her family in the sequence ''Drought Days,'' and facing her inheritance as a white southern woman growing up amid racial division and violence. The poet encounters her own naive complicity in southern racism and challenges the narrative of her homeland, the ''Gone with the Wind'' mythology that still haunts the region.Ultimately, Descent creates a fragile reconciliation between past and present, calling over and over again to celebrate being, as in the book's closing manifesto, ''Here. Where I am.''

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Kathryn Stripling Byer was raised on a farm in Southwest Georgia, where the material for much of her first poetry originated. She graduated from Wesleyan College, Macon, Georgia, with a degree in English literature, and afterward, received her MFA degree from UNC-Greensboro, where she studied with Fred Chappell and Robert Watson, as well as forming enduring friendships with James Applewhite and Gibbons Ruark. After graduation she worked at Western Carolina University, becoming Poet-in-Residence in 1990. Her poetry, prose, and fiction have appeared widely, including Hudson Review, Poetry, The Atlantic, Georgia Review, Shenandoah, and Southern Poetry Review. Often anthologized, her work has also been featured online, where she maintains the blogs "Here, Where I Am," and "The Mountain Woman." Her body of work was discussed along with that of Charles Wright, Robert Morgan, Fred Chappell, Jeff Daniel Marion, and Jim Wayne Miller in Six Poets from the Mountain South, by John Lang, published by LSU Press. Her first book of poetry, The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest, was published in the AWP Award Series in 1986, followed by the Lamont (now Laughlin) prize-winning Wildwood Flower, from LSU Press. Her subsequent collections have been published in the LSU Press Poetry Series, receiving various awards, including the Hanes Poetry Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Poetry Award, and the Roanoke-Chowan Award. She served for five years as North Carolina's first woman poet laureate. She lived in the mountains of western North Carolina with her husband and three dogs. (from the author's website)

Reviews

[Christie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a wonderful book of poems that evokes life in the Appalachian mountains with each turn of the page. I'm sure to read this one another thirty times, at least.

[Peggy Heitmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kathryn Stripling Byer is one of my favorite narrative poets. Even though she is from the mountains of North Carolina, and I am from the red-clay fields of Alabama, I can relate to many of the stories she tells about her kin. I always naming of local trees whose names make music all by themselves, for example pitch pine. From this collection I like the first poem titled At the End best. As usual with most poets I LOVE some poems and not others. This was her last book. She died in 2006.

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kay's last book - of course she couldn't know that. Still, I read into every poem a finality she probably didn't intend.

She does more reflecting here than in her previous books. She moves between the Georgian countryside where she was raised and the North Carolina mountains where she spent most of her later life.

It's as good a farewell as anyone could hope to leave behind.

[Brice Fuqua · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent collection by one of the South's best contemporary poets.

[J. Robin Whitley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Byer captures in her latest book the South I've known. I'll read this book over and over because of how it connects me with my farming family and how it reminds me of my childhood. That doesn't mean that every poem is full of light; the darkness of racism a reality as well as death that knocks on every door.