Wildwood Flower: Poems - Softcover

Byer, Kathryn Stripling

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807117714 ISBN 13: 9780807117712

Publisher: LSU Press, 1992

Synopsis

In Wildflower Flower, whose title derives from a traditional country song, Byer speaks through the fictional voice of a mountain woman named Alma, who lived in the Blue Ridge wilderness around the turn of the century. In narrative and lyric, Byer’s poems sing a journey through solitude, capturing the spirit and the sound of mountain ballads and of the women who sang them, stitching bits and pieces of their hardscrabble lives into lasting patterns. The landscape Byer depicts is haunted by disappointed love and physical hardship, but it is blessed with dogwood and trillium, columbine and hickory, and streams that sing a ballad as strong as any Alma has learned from mother or grandmother. Through these natural details and through Alma’s indomitable voice, Kathryn Stripling Byer has brilliantly recreated a lost world.

About this title

About the Author

A native of Georgia, Kathryn Stripling Byer has lived in the western North Carolina mountains since receiving a graduate degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she studied with Allen Tate, Robert Watson, and Fred Chappell. Her several books of poetry have received honors from the Associated Writing Programs, the Academy of American Poets, the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance.

From Publishers Weekly

The title poem of Byer's collection, the 1992 Lamont Poetry selection, introduces readers to the themes of self-reliance and respect for tradition that are woven into the broad narrative design of the book: "In the stream where I scrub my own blood / from rags, I see all things flow / down from me into the valley." The dominant voice here belongs to a woman named Alma who lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains at the turn of the century. The poems, filled with references to mountain ballads and wild flowers from that region, attempt to piece together the hard and lonely experience of women in the mountain frontier. At times, the imagery in the poems is striking: " 'Who are you?" I asked the shade / where her milk bucket rusted to nothing / but rim . . . " But in general the work is unoriginal. By and large, the poems are built in stanzas of free verse, technically similar to the conventional fare of contemporary poetry. Byer ( The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest ) does not create a new idiom for Alma's voice and there are few surprises in her confessions.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0807117714
• ISBN 13: 9780807117712
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 68