Kathryn Stripling Byer. Coming to Rest. Baton Rouge: LSU Press,
2006. 63 pages. Hardback $45.00. Trade paperback $16.95.

This new collection by North Carolina’s Poet Laureate offers readers
a splendid variety of subject matter, tone and poetic forms. The book’s
thirty-six poems (along with an untitled “song” that concludes the
second of its three parts) address such topics as family relationships
and home, memory, mortality, “the old hymn of April” as Byer writes
in “I Listen” (12), and the power of “language [to] raise the world up /
from the grave of our common amnesia” (56). In “Nets,” she notes how
“Line / for the caveman worked / magic” in its depiction of bison and
mammoth; the same can be said for many of Byer’s own lines.
The title of Part 1, “Again,” announces the volume’s emphasis on
memory and on the motif of return, both literal and figurative. The
epigraph to this section comes from Seamus Heaney’s “The Birthplace,”
lines that give Byer’s book its title and a good share of its thematic
focus:
We come back emptied,
to nourish and resist
the words of coming to rest:
birthplace, roofbeam, whitewash,
flagstone, hearth (1).
“Home” is a key term in this collection, occurring in at least twenty
different poems, including the opening poem, “Coastal Plain,” which
speaks of “Home that calls // and calls / and calls” (4) and which
uses couplets of identical rhyme as if to mirror, stanza by stanza, the
movement of return. In the five-part title poem, Byer displays her skill
with both traditional forms and free verse by including a villanelle,
a sonnet and a ghazal. The final seven of the twelve poems in Part
1 deal with experiences involving the poet’s daughter Corinna, to
whom Coming to Rest is dedicated, experiences that range from infancy
to Cory’s twenty-first birthday. The final poem in Part 1, “Chicago
Bound,” with its portrait of an airplane flight to that city, where Cory
awaits her parents’ visit to celebrate her birthday, provides a skillful
transition to Part 2, which utilizes the journey motif in fifteen poems
describing a trip to the western United States and the poet’s subsequent
return home.
Entitled “Singing to Salt Woman,” Part 2 is unified not only by
the motif of the journey but also by water imagery. Here the term
“home” recurs often, but Byer also inquires, “what’s native now?” (28),
a question she responds to in “Zuni,” the central poem in Part 2, in
which she remarks:
Maybe native means nothing
if not our own way of recovering,
back to the first wind
that quickened it, what we call
home. . . . (33)
The legend of Salt Woman cited in “Zuni” takes readers back to what
the poem’s closing lines call “a creation story / whose ripples keep
spreading / beyond comprehension” (33). Byer again invokes the
mythopoeic thrust of the human imagination in “Edge of Plains,” a
poem that contrasts the Mormons’ vision of a “heavenly paradise” with
the Anasazi’s embrace of “earthly / repose” (35). Just as the trajectory
of the airplane in “Chicago Bound” is earthward (“if it’s down / there
on earth where you are, / it’s Sweet Home,” says the poet to Corinna),
so the trajectory of Byer’s poetic vision in Part 2 comes to rest on the
images of a linen tablecloth settling over a table and of Alice Mathews,
Byer’s former colleague at Western Carolina University to whom the
poems in Part 2 are dedicated, delighting in the sight and smell and
taste of raspberries.
Part 3, “Closer,” contains just ten poems, yet all but the last run
longer than any of the poems in Part 2. This section’s title invites readers
to ask, “Closer to what?” Among many possible answers, two seem
prominent: closer to death, to the sense of mortality that haunts many
of these poems, and closer to home, whether home denotes a particular
place or the recovery of one’s past or ultimate union with the life force
manifest on “the dawn of the first morning” (35). The epigraph to Part
3 refers to “the call / and response of memory” (41), and this section’s
opening poem, “The Still Here and Now,” recollects the poet’s first day
as a college student and repeats such key terms from Part 2 as “journey”
and “water.” It is the past’s ongoing presence that poetry, indeed much
art, makes possible, as the title of this poem indicates. Several of the
poems in Part 3 deal with various painters and paintings, from the
cave art at Lascaux to work by Frida Kahlo and the poet’s own great-
grandmother. Byer writes of “the clearing of art” (56), a phrase that
suggests both cultivated or tended space and lucidity of vision, traits
characteristic of her own carefully crafted poems. In Coming to Rest,
that clarity and expansiveness of vision include the dead, especially
the poet’s deceased family members, who are vivid presences in such
poems as “Hallows” and “Halloween” in Part 1 and “Self-Portrait with
Shades” (a delightful pun), “Los Muertos” and “Halloween Again” in
Part 3. But Byer vastly enlarges the reader’s sense of family in the
final section’s “Her Daughter,” for here the poet links Corinna of Part
1 to the unnamed daughter of an anonymous Iraqi woman, a daughter
whose corpse is being retrieved from the rubble of a bombed building.
The striking contrast between Corinna’s comfortable existence and the
fate of this other mother’s daughter reminds readers of the deadly cost
of U. S. foreign policy in the Middle East.
In “Closer,” the book’s final poem, Byer re-emphasizes the motif of
return by again using the couplets she employed in her initial poem,
“Coastal Plain,” by repeating that poem’s title phrase, and by again
invoking images of journeying and homecoming. “Closer” is among
the loveliest poems in this collection in terms of its tightly woven sound
effects in such lines as “old road dreaming me back home” and “maybe souls
do flow into and out of the world-- / that crow over corn stubble, scythe of light
// off the truck’s chrome” (62). Yet beyond such specific instances of Byer’s
craft, the artistry of this collection lies in its overarching architecture of
theme and motif, the interrelationships among its parts. Coming to Rest
is a book to be savored again and again, with each rereading enriching
one’s appreciation for Byer’s skillfully wrought, eminently humane
poetry.
—John Lang