LIVING ABOVE THE FROST LINE RECOMMENDS THAT YOU READ DESCENT

Louisiana State University Press published yet another full length collection of poems by Kathryn Stripling Byer, on November 5, 2012, this her sixth collection.

Descent (poetry) by Kathryn Stripling Byer

Louisiana State University Press
$17.95, paperback  ISBN: 978-0-807147504

Navigating the dangerous currents of family and race, Kathryn Stripling Byer’s sixth poetry collection confronts the legacy of southern memory, 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.”

A LOVE NOTE IN BLUE AND RED:

Lovers of Poetry, My Fellow Practicing Poets, and My Poetry Students who follow my thoughts that come from Living Above the Frost Line, you must buy Descent if you have not done already so. Well, of course, you do not have to if you do not want to buy the book. It's not my business to twist your arm. I can't stop myself.  Between the pages of this book there is immeasurable understanding of that long ago time.  You can gain much from reading it, wisdom for your life and advancement for your own poetry writing. --Nancy Simpson

Descent, a major collection is also endorsed by two of the south’s most prominent  poets: Alice Friman and David Huddle.

“From the glorious opening poem, the mourning sound of the morning train weaves through Kathryn Stripling Byer’s new collection, as much a part of the hills of home as are its sins and beauties. Oh, the longing to shed forever what we are and what made us, at the same time hugging the litany to us that brings it all back: Cullowhee Creek, Buzzards Roost, hay bales, blackberries, grandmother’s gladiolas and lace doilies, and the earth that knew us better than we knew ourselves. Such longing in these pages, such hunger, such ‘grabbing at air.’"
—Alice Friman

“A Kay Byer poem is utterly compelling from its opening lines: “Now take this, she’d say, her mouth / full of pins—a bird’s tail / of fastenings held tight / against revelation.” Even those of us who’ve read and loved her work for years scratch our heads and mutter to ourselves, How does she do that? The poems in her new book, Descent, both embrace and struggle against her heritage as a woman of the both the deep South and the southern mountains. Her work is to be cherished for its beauty, its courage, and the gift of its revelation. Her poems shine a light that we yearn for here in the darkness of the Twenty-First Century.”

—David Huddle

Want to buy the book?  Click below L.S.U. Press or Amazon.com
and City Lights Book Store in Sylva, NC 

http://lsupress.org/books/detail/descent/

http://www.amazon.com/Descent-Poems-Kathryn-Stripling-Byer/dp/0807147508

http://www.citylightsnc.com/search/apachesolr_search/Descent%20Kathryn%20Stripling%20Byer
Here is where you can get a signed copy. 

"Digging" and "Looking Down Into a Ditch" - Two Poems By John Stone

DIGGING by John Stone

My son is following
a tree root to its source,
learning connections,
dirt and purpose
all at once.

He has attacked it before,
but from topside,
monkeying the limbs.

He shows me the branches
underground,
makes me believe
there are leaves on them
in some different season

when we must come back and look.


from the collection THE SMELL OF MATCHES
Louisiana State University Press



LOOKING DOWN INTO A DITCH by John Stone

Watching the workmen dig a ditch
watching them lay in the pipe

for the waste and gasses
and liquids of our living

I think of the lost maps
of lost cities, their pipes
still moving off
in important directions

of people I knew
who are now in the serious dirt

of the ditches at Dachau

of my father.

It is hard
to keep remembering
across the ditches we have made
and covered over
with terrible earth-moving sound

how much of our dying
we must find ways not to need,
how much of what keeps us alive
is underground.

from the collection IN ALL THIS RAIN
Louisiana State University Press


John Stone was born Feb. 7, 1936 in Jackson, Mississippi and he died on November 6, 2008 at his home near Atlanta. He was four times honored as Georgia Writer of the year . A memorial poetry reading was held in his honor January 14, 2009 at Callanwolde Conservatory. During parts of the 1970s and 1980s John Stone served on the Callanwolde Poetry Committee.

He was the author of The Smell of Matches 1972, 1989 LSU Press, Where Water Begins, LSU Press 1998,In All this Rain 1980 LSU Press, Renaming the Streets, 1985 LSU Press, Music From Apartment 8: New and Selected Poems 2004 LSU Press. In 1990 Delacorte Press published In the Country of Hearts: Journeys in the Art of Medicine, (Essays). The book was reprinted by LSU Press in 1996.

Dr. John Stone was Professor Emeritus of Cardiology at Emory University in Atlanta. He also taught English Literature at Emory and at Oxford University in England.

PHYSICIAN POET JOHN STONE 1936-2008

Beloved Southern Physician Poet John Stone, born February 7, 1936, in Jackson, Mississippi, died on November 6, 2008.  He will be mourned.

John Stone was an emeritus professor of medicine in cardiology at Emory University.  He published many collections of poetry and a collection of essays during the time he taught English Literature and Medicine at Emory and at Oxford University, England.

His most recent poetry collections were published at Louisiana State University Press including Where Water Begins and Music from Apartment 8.  His essay collection, also from LSU Press is titled In the Country of Hearts: Journeys in the Art of Medicine. 

Early poetry collections from the 1980s, also from LSU Press are: The Smell of Matches, In All This Rain, and Renaming the Streets.