Dannye Romine Powel.  In the Sunroom with Raymond Carver.  Press 53.  2020.

Sandra Ann Winters.  Do Not Touch.  Salmon Poetry.  2020 (Review comments are in Bold)

Here we have two new collections of poems by North Carolina poets:  Do Not Touch, by Sandra Ann Winters, and In the Sunroom with Raymond Carver, by Dannye Romine Powell.  Asked to review these two books, I first pondered whether they were assigned to me randomly, or with some thought to their pairing.  I do not know the answer, but at the risk of violating the old proscription against revealing “how the sausage gets made,” I’ll share my notes from my first reading of both books:  Mothers and fathers, wives and husbands, who were once daughters and sons of other mothers and fathers, now gone to dust, their deaths remembered, replayed, and commemorated.  Children, their pleasures and pains.  The pines, the moon, the wind, the flowers, that island. . .

     Well, enough of that, but one must begin somewhere.  A simple survey of content, of subject matter, though, is the easy part.  What about style?  There’s the rub.  The first thing that struck me, stylistically, about these poets is their elegance, and I employ that term in both its aesthetic and scientific dimensions:  both poets write with a pleasantly graceful and very satisfying simplicity of style.

     There are differences, however, to which the fact that Winter’s book was published by Salmon Press, which has been “Publishing Irish and International Poetry Since 1981,” provides a clue.  Winters was until recently a professor of Irish and English literature and at least a couple of her poems contain notes claiming W. B. Yeats as an influence.  Like those of Yeats, and perhaps another Irish favorite, Patrick Kavanagh, Winter’s poems are sturdy, earthy, but also lovely and musical.  Thinking of that note of earthiness, and their various references to Irish things and places, I was tempted to say that her poems possess a “provincial elegance.”  Although “provincial” has become, for some, a pejorative term, this life-long dweller of the rural American South doesn’t see it that way.  Was Yeats provincial?  I would certainly say he was, and also sophisticated and cosmopolitan.  Perhaps you could substitute “vernacular” for “provincial” if my argument fails to convince you.

     Powell’s poems, by contrast, possess an equally delightful urbanity.  Like the great and sadly departed American poet William Matthews, Powell writes simply and elegantly of the pains and pleasures of being human.  But beneath that simplicity and elegance lies a vast reservoir of cultural knowledge and experience that infuses every well-chosen word, every beautifully crafted line.  And so, back to subject matter.  To come to a better appreciation of these two poets, let’s explore how they deal with a mother’s death, a fraught relationship with a son, and, more quirkily, their relationship to an island.

     A mother’s death.  Winter’s poem on this sad subject has the rather surprising title “Atlanta Braves.”  The poem comprises four unrhymed quatrains featuring numerous simple, declarative sentences, such as the first line: “The moon was full the night you died.”  After that terse beginning, the first two quatrains feature longer, richer, more complex sentences, which serve well to set the scene, describing the moon as “glossed gold, glazing the dark room with light.”  The alliteration of “glossed gold, glazing” provides a nice bit of verbal music, as does the internal rhyming of “light” and “bright” in lines three and four.  The moon is described as “a Supermoon,” which is when the full moon nearly coincides with perigee, when the moon comes closest to the Earth in its elliptical orbit.  The second stanza comprises one long complex sentence in which the speaker, childlike, “climbed in beside you” in the bed, offering the tender ministrations of an embrace and “a wet sponge on your lips. . ./. . .dry and cracked.”  The final two quatrains revert to simple declarative sentences again, appropriate for moving the narrative on.  Each of these stanzas contains an example of unusual syntax which may or may not bespeak Winter’s Irish influences, but which lend a charming, somewhat rustic musicality to her style:  “I slept on the floor beside your bed to catch you / from falling out” in the third quatrain, and “You cried a long night, Help me, Help me” in the fourth.  These function similarly to the pleasing rural New England locutions found in Robert Frost’s poems.  In order to calm her dying mother, the speaker tells us, “I sang your favorite song, “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” thus explaining the poem’s title.  The final line is simple and direct: “Then the moon called you away.”  The prominence of the moon suggests a possible mythical allusion to the goddess Artemis/Diana, the huntress, always associated with the moon.  Women who died a relatively quick and painless death were said to have been shot by one of the goddess’s silver arrows.

     Powell, too has written an elegy for her mother.  Titled with unflinching economy, “Dead” faintly echoes the beginning of another famous parental elegy, Anne Sexton’s “The Truth the Dead Know” (“Gone, I say”).  Powell’s “Dead” begins emphatically (or is it beseechingly?), “I tell you she was luminous, / my mother, a ballerina.”  The pronoun “you” makes one wonder whom the speaker is addressing – the reader, perhaps, or is it someone else present in the poem?  The stark contrast of “her blue nightgown / on the undertaker’s gray slab / of table” reinforces the disquieting thought that the morgue slab is a macabre substitute for the ballerina’s stage.  And as we tend to think of dancers as youthful and vibrant, the speaker marvels at the momentary illusion: “The flaked and wrinkled, / gone.  The stroke’s wither / and slant, vanished.”  Apparently, there is another person present – “A man / brought scissors for me to snip / a lock of her silver hair” – but it is unclear if he is the “you” addressed in the poem’s first line.  With beautiful and subtle complexity, the poem begins its turn here.  Reaching for her dead mother’s hand, the speaker asks, “Where / from here?”  It’s an odd, multivalent question.  The line break suggests perhaps a slight pause, like an absent comma, between “Where” and “from here?” If so, then maybe she is asking the man who brought the scissors, “From where should I cut the lock of hair?”  The emotional weight of the circumstance lends a confusing existential uncertainty to such a simple act.  However, the speaker’s question is immediately followed by “She,” which is emphasized by virtue of its placement as the final word in that line.  More likely, then, the speaker is asking the question (“Where do I go from here?”) of her dead mother, who of course does not answer: “She, / who believed she was sky / to my meadow, was silent.”  This, then is the truth the dead know, that they can provide no answer.  Apropos of her role in the speaker’s life as “sky / to my meadow,” the mother’s silence is beautifully rendered as “the absence of sun or rain.”

     A fraught relationship with a son.  Powell returns to this subject again and again in her collection – a mother’s attempts to deal with her alcoholic son.  At least a dozen poems address this subject, including the title poem, which is also the first poem in the collection.  One of the strategies she employs is the creation of a character, or persona, called “Longing,” through which she explores the subject.  One of the most powerful of these poems is “Longing Weeps at the BBQ Shack in Cashiers, North Carolina.”  The poem begins with an acknowledgement of the power of music to evoke memories – “She blames it on the music” – in this case Kris Kristofferson’s song “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” which a performer is singing at the BBQ shack and which “her son played / back in his teens.”  “No wonder / her tears,” she thinks, “last night’s news / that he’s hitting the bottle again / still salty and raw.”  Like many in such a painful, lengthy, ebbing and flowing situation, she

            . . . believes

            she’s grown accustomed

            to this seesaw of slurred promises

            and boozy refusals, believes

            she can go through her days

            without giving him much thought.

The placement of “believes,” twice, at the ends of lines, emphasizes both the power of such belief as a coping strategy and its ultimate inadequacy when the alcoholic is flesh and blood, one’s own son.  “And usually she can,” Longing tells us, since that’s how one makes it through such pain, day by day, and “usually” it works, “until the words / to the old songs drift by / and she remembers.”

     What does she remember?  Oh, only a simple childhood thing, part of a mother’s daily chores:

            a time

            when she kept his Legos

            in the blue plastic tub, his toy soldiers

            in the red one, and no matter his havoc,

            she could pick up all the pieces

            and make everything look just so.

But those days are long gone, and the devastation is complete.

     Winters deals with this subject in a triptych of poems that concludes her collection.  The aptly titled “There is an Edge to Our Love” is the second of these.  It’s an ordinary, everyday setting – mother and son are in town, walking to the movie theater: “Mom, watch the curb.  Walking ahead / my black purse swinging from his shoulder, / he talks me over the broken pavement.”  There seems to be an air of impatience about the son, though, with his querulous, overly cautious attentiveness, but also the fact that he is “Walking ahead” of her, rather than beside her offering a steady arm to offset the potentially dangerous “broken pavement.”  He is carrying her purse, which, while helpful, suggests a sort of oblivious possessiveness and intrusion into her personal space.  Like Longing, in Powell’s poem, she, too, remembers something from her son’s childhood, a duty, a care: “I had held his hand across the street once.”  Now, though, the son “forges on with cautions tossed,” impatient with his elderly charge, which the mother notes: “I am broken now like the pavement.  He is not / trying to piece me together, but to get me there.” Once at the theater, the son continues his necessary duties: “He puts me in a recliner / pushes the buttons, I swing back, / my popcorn flying.”  After cleaning up his mother’s “mess” he lets fly with the petty irritation that has been preoccupying him: “I asked you not to tell David about the car, he snaps. / I wish you wouldn’t, and if I want to buy a black BMW I will.” Though her situation is not as emotionally devastating as Longing’s with her alcoholic son, this mother is clearly wounded by her son’s simmering anger toward her, and especially by the fact that he seems to be “caring” for her only out of a sense of filial duty.  The poem ends much like it began, though perhaps with a darker tone as “ledge” is substituted for “curb”: Back to the street, he walks ahead, my black purse still swinging. / Watch the ledge, Mom.”

That island.  Both Winters and Powell possess a keen eye for observing and describing nature.  Winter’s volume includes more than one poem about an island, and one of these, an unrhymed sonnet, is called “Sherkin Island,” which lies in Roaringwater Bay (the title of the previous poem in the collection), southwest of County Cork, Ireland.  It is accessible via a short ferry ride from Baltimore, a fishing village, and that’s where this largely descriptive poem begins: “We leave the ferryman, walk the path.”  There are obviously two people in the poem, but the identity of the second person is not clear.  Winter’s book is divided into two sections; this poem is included in the second, which mostly deals with family members, so it is likely that the second person is a family member.  The poem provides a rich detailed description of the small island: “Stone-stacked walls fill the horizon. / Trailing honeysuckles rove through hedgerows. / Hart’s Tongue grows.  Marsh orchids bow.”  The poem is largely descriptive, so the action consists of typical things people might do on an outing:  pick flowers, eat wild berries, watch birds, collect shells.  The details, however, are rendered in musical, charged language: “Black-backed gulls, terns, choughs / drift on the wind.  Puffins cling to a cliff. / We watch harbor seals roil in the waves.” The alliteration of “Black-backed” and “cling to a cliff” provides a perfect mating of sound and sense, evoking the restless activity of the wind and waves captured in the well-chosen verb “roil.” The poem ends with the speaker collecting oyster shells on the strand, looking “for the silver shine. / Over and over again, we are one,” the speaker concludes, expressing the momentary communal transcendence occasioned by a walk in nature.

     Powell’s poem about an island bears the evocative title “The Landscape of Before.” The island is not named, though we are told, “Once the island bore a name, spoken here / and there, inked on ancient maps.” The poem has six long lines, giving it the appearance of a brief prose poem, and like many prose poems, it has a mystical, evanescent, fairytale quality.  Like Winter’s poem, Powell’s is highly descriptive: “Wind sand through pines. Lopsided moon. Water rushing between / her fingers as if it had lost its way.”  The island possesses a strong, almost mystical appeal for the speaker: “She loved this island.”  The poem is a dreamlike memory, as the title suggests, a long-lost landscape, a never-never land, faintly remembered from a time “before” – what? Adulthood, with all its losses, concessions, and surrenders, perhaps?  At any rate, the island, and all it represents, remain a tantalizing, shimmering memory as the speaker concludes:  “Sometimes, in her sleep, she tastes / those days, like something purple and wild that clustered near the shore.”

     It is a pleasure to immerse oneself in these two satisfying, graceful, and elegant collections and the worlds they create.

JIM CLARK is Professor Emeritus of English at Barton College in Wilson, NC, where he was the Elizabeth H. Jordan Professor of Southern Literature and served as Dean of the School of Humanities.  Some of his honors include the Randall Jarrell Scholarship, the Harriette Simpson Arnow Short Story Award, and the Merrill Moore Writing Award.  He served as the President of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association in 2015 and Chair of the North Carolina Writers Conference in 2017.

DANNYE ROMINE POWELL is the author of five poetry collections, two of which received the Brockman-Campbell Award for the best book of poetry published by a North Carolinian in the previous year.  In the Sunroom with Raymond Carver won the 2020 Roanoke-Chowan Award.  She has also been awarded fellowships in poetry from the NEA, the North Carolina Arts Council, and Yaddo.  A resident of Charlotte, NC, she is the longtime book editor of the Charlotte Observer.

SANDRA ANN WINTERS served as a Professor of English and Irish Studies at Guilford College in Greensboro, NC, from 1989 to her retirement in 2011.  She lives part of the year in Millstreet, County Cork, Ireland, where she spends time reading, writing, and presenting workshops and readings.