2006 Kakalak Anthology of Carolina Poets

reviewed by JoSelle Vanderhooft

 2006 Kakalak Anthology of Carolina Poets

Lisa Zerkle, Richard Allen Taylor, Beth Cagle Burt (editors)

Susan Ludvigson (poetry contest judge)

Main Street Rag Publishing Company

ISBN Number: 1599480255

Reviewer: JoSelle Vanderhooft

          For several years, Main Street Rag has published many fine collections by Southern poets, including Carolinian M. Scott Douglass’s rugged Steel Womb Revisited and Floridian Jay Griswold’s earthy Conquistador. Earlier this year, the press added another fine title to its list of offerings, 2006 Kakalak Anthology of Carolina Poets. Named after a Carolinian term which means being able to laugh at one’s origins while still feeling pride and affection towards them, the first Kakalak anthology features the work of well over 100 poets, including Kakalak contest winners and Carolina Poets Laureate past and present. Despite the anthology’s fairly playful title, not all of its poems are lighthearted and gentle. In fact, many of them don’t even discuss life in the Carolinas. Though few of the poems run longer than a page in length, their similarities end here; indeed, the anthology draws its strength from this diverse mix of voices, styles, and subjects.

          The Kakalak Anthology’s poetry is divided into three sections: contest award winners, work from Poets Laureate, and finally the work of selected poets. The award winners’ section is a strong opening to the book and an excellent sample of the diversity which makes the anthology so successful. Though all of the poetry in this section is exquisite, stand-out pieces include Diana Pinckney’s “The Spinster Considers Her Options" (a sober tale involving patricidal thoughts and lost love), Carolyn Beard Whitlow’s “Silly" (which concerns the struggle between a slave and a slave owner’s wife over mothering of a child), David Brendan Hopes’s meditative “French Broad Studio," and Susan Lefler’s “Drawing from Inside Out," an Escherian look at the beauty of life in unexpected places, such as the inside of a dog and snakes hiding beneath porches.

          However, this section’s most memorable poem is by far Gail Peck’s “Woman with Dead Child," a haunting, sparse look at a premature birth modeled upon an etching by Kaethe Kollwitz, and here reproduced in full.

Death has made them both naked.

The mother is sitting, holding her child,

her mouth and chin pressed against the child’s chest

so that we only see the lines in her forehead

and her closed eyes.

The infant I carried six months

lived through the night. When I asked

to see her, I was told to wait until morning.

then I had to give a name to what was only spirit,

and she had to be buried

since she weighted more than a pound.

It was wrong of them not to let me see her,

wrong of me to wait months before going

to stand over the Marker in the Louisiana sun.

The day comes back to me now,

and how months later,

I found, in a folder, a certificate

my husband had put there—

the smallest of prints:

curve of the right foot, curve of the left. 

          The next section features work from the current Poets Laureate Kathryn Stripling Byer (North Carolina, 2005 to present) and Marjory Heath Wentworth (South Carolina, 2003 to present). Perhaps unsurprisingly, given their titles, their four poems (two each) examine Carolina-specific topics. Byer’s poems “Glorified" and “Easter Morning on the Hairpin Curve" respectively discuss the changing roles of southern women and the quiet beauty of the Grey Smoky Mountains’ landscape. Wentworth’s “Japanese Landscape" is a look at the clear, quiet aesthetic of Japanese painting while her “Despite Gravity" is a tribute to all Carolina bridge builders, past and present. Each woman’s work is elegant, economic, and ephemeral in word and image; they are credits to the poetic heritage of their states.

          Also included are two fairly experimental poems by Fred Chappell, who served as North Carolina’s Poet Laureate from 1997 through 2002. His offerings, “Past Presence" and “Black Gate" (here reproduced in full), a lovely and original mediation on death, are poems with another poem hidden inside.

You go out when the midnight calls your name

Into a silent and immense wrong space.

The Gate, the unreflective stone your gaze

Avoids, hingeless shall turn but once, when time

Relents, and when that shall be done, shall claim

The egress, and refuse the least response, and cease

To open to woman, child, or man, fix grace

On anything you did or path you came. 

          The final section contains the bulk of the anthology, and is also the part where the diversity of the Carolinas’ excellent poets truly shines. While a large number of poems in these pieces are devoted to the history, landscape, and daily life of the Carolinas, several explore the history, landscapes, and daily life in other states, and even other countries. Genevieve C. Kissack’s “Dimitria" looks at the Holocaust from the eyes of a little girl powerless to fight back as the Gestapo carries her Jewish friend away, and Nora Hutton Shepard’s “Elegy for Roosters: Avian Flu" skillfully examines the personal relationships between people and birds in Asia. By stepping out of what is traditionally thought of as southern culture and the southern landscape, the Kakalak Anthology shows its part of the south for the culturally, ethnically, and experientially diverse region it has always been.

          The anthology is also notable for another, less obvious form of diversity—that in poetic style. Most contemporary anthologies seem loathe to include poetry written in more traditional forms, such as sestinas, sonnets, and almost anything with an obvious rhyme scheme. But the Kakalak Anthology includes not only a sestina, but a concrete poem, a sonnet, and two poems in blank verse. Without exception these poems are thoughtful, profound, and excellent examples of how more traditional poetic forms can borrow from the past while still appealing to a contemporary aesthetic. Of all these traditional poems, Sally Buckner’s “Lasting Rites" (a blank verse poem about Alzheimer’s Disease) best typifies this balance.

You were gone long, long before you left—

slipped through the narrow cracks of our attention,

stowed bits of self in some unknown dimension.

Your shadow cleverly concealed the shift.

Vanishing became your surest craft.

Or were we victims of audacious theft,

the jewels pilfered, one by shining one

till we held nothing but a scrawny string?

If so, how bold the burglar! And how deft!

Sometimes, like an unexpected gift

you’d flit across the stage, in cameos.

We’d lift our hands, preparing for applause—

you’d disappear, a snowflake in a drift,

leaving us once more alone, rebuffed…

          The artwork scattered throughout the anthology also deserves mention. From photographs of local crafts (“Mandy’s Whack & Stack Quilt" by Krissa Palmer) to watercolors, silkscreen images, installations, and more traditional photography, the artwork in the book does a good job of evoking a sense of place and texture. The anthology’s main flaw, however, is that the black and white images of the art (and the silkscreen images in particular) are not always the best quality, which makes it difficult for the reader to truly appreciate patterns, textures, and gradations. But this may be due more to the limitations of black and white reproductions than any poor photographic quality. Nonetheless, it is only a minor flaw.

          The 2006 Kakalak Anthology of Carolina Poets is an engaging and beautifully designed volume which does a thorough job of representing the poetic and artistic diversity of two states with a particularly rich cultural heritage. Readers of southern literature will appreciate this volume, and readers new to the writing of this region will also appreciate its depth.