- Paperback: 68 pages
- Publisher: Scholarly Book Services Inc; Reissue edition (Jun 27 2002)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0807117714
- ISBN-13: 978-0807117712
- Product Dimensions: 22.7 x 14 x 0.6 cm
- Shipping Weight: 109 g
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
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Product Details |
Product Description
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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Book Description
In Wildwood Flower, Kathryn Stripling 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.
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Publishers Weekly is off the mark!,
By A Customer
This review is from: Wildwood Flower: Poems (Paperback)
Lord only knows who Publishers Weekly gets to review its books, but it goofed with this reviewer. (Maybe from NYC, too jaded to know what real poetry is?) This is a wonderful book, lyrical, unashamedly so, and full of the the details that make literature stay in one's imagination.While the NYC critics celebrate the obscure and fashionable (Jorie Graham, anyone???), real poets are out in the hinterlands writing memorable poetry. Let's read them and let the literary establishment go about its silly business.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wildwood Flower Sings!,
By A Customer
This review is from: Wildwood Flower: Poems (Paperback)
So much of contemporary poetry is as prosy as your average obituary. And just about as engaging. A few poets, more than a few of them from the South, still know how to wield a line, a stanza, a whole poem. This poet does. The poems in this book, in the voice of a mountain woman named Alma, gather up the physical, emotional, erotic life of one woman into a texture of beauty and terror. "Abandoned to hoot owls and copperheads," Alma survives and sings her journey through the dark into luminous song. If you despair of what is happening to poetry, these days, don't. Read this book.
5.0 out of 5 stars
A voice from the blue Ridge Mountains,
By Dianne L. Moses (New Hampshire) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Wildwood Flower: Poems (Paperback)
Byer is quoted as saying of the Blue Ridge Mts. "...these mountains are a crazy-quilt of trails haunted by women's voices," and what Byer is successful in doing is bringing those voices to life. Each poem connects the reader with the lives of women who have lived in the mountians, the isolation of their daily lives and how they sink into or break the isolation by communicating with each other through their songs. The poems are sometimes joyful and sometimes haunting as the boundary between domestic space and nature overlap. I couldn't stop reading and usually with poetry I only read one or two poems at a time and then let it settle. But with this book I got caught up Byer's crazy-quilt and read untill the end. It is a rich book.
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