Catching Light: Poems

by Kathryn Stripling Byer

In Catching Light, Kathryn Stripling Byer searched for the language of aging, for a way of confronting every woman's fear of looking in the mirror and seeing an old woman staring back. Inspired by a series of photographs entitled "Evelyn"-which depicts a former artist's model in her declining years, still full of life and facing death with flair and wit-Byer finds a voice to contemplate the enigmatic but inevitable process of growing old. Byer opens her book with a ten-poem sequence, In the Photograph Gallery. " 'Who is she?'/a child hanging on to her mother's skirt/ asks, as if she is frightened/ by what she sees. 'Just a little old lady,'/her mother soothes/That's all she is.'" By placing Evelyn herself in the gallery to respond to the photos, and hear that exchange, Byer opens the door into the inner life of this "little old lady." Part Two moves into more personal, mythological territory as the images of Evelyn and the poet's own recollections coalesce. The final section draws closer to Evelyn's dark hour, her humor in the face of death, her memories, her acknowledgement of her sexuality, her letting go. Catching Light is a profound inquiry into aging and how one remarkable woman faces it, sings to it, mocks its, rebels against it, and ultimately embraces it.

Genres: Poetry

62 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2002

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

[Marguerite Hargreaves · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely reveries about female aging from Kathryn Stripling Byer. She doesn't mince words nor flinch from reality. And, yet, the language here is far from pedestrian:

"White feather ... what wing did you stray from? What message of warning do you bring?"

"The leaves try to teach me a thing or two yet about dying."

"I ask myself what can an old woman grow from her bones and her blood that could root its way deep enough into those memories nobody knows how to see till our eyes have been shut for a long time?"

"words streaming onto the ivory vellum like blue tributaries"

"the cotton-stuffed silence of death"

"Meanwhile, his mouth full of false teeth and snuff, his idle hands age-speckled, God sits alone in his canopy of stars."

"Her scent? The scorch after lightning strikes."

My favorite poem is Unanswerable:
"When I am gone from this house
will a coil of my silver hair navigate stairwells and empty rooms
when there's enough wind to find it,
enough light to shine on my almost gone presence?
And if there should be such a shimmering,
who would be here to see it?"

"How does the odor of death ride on wind?
Like a strip of confetti?
A crow's feather?
An old woman's nightgown blown clean off the clothesline??"

[Peggy Heitmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kathryn Stripling Byer always writes about the mountain people of NC, or of legends that followed them from their native country to the Appalachians. I love her voice. I love this line form her poem, "Aria," "I hear time scratching counterpoint/into the art of her voice," and this one, "The cotton-/stuffed silence of death." I read everything I can find by her.