Catalpa (review)

Abstract

Anyway, the voice in these stories is Io Carson live, in print, coming to you for your enjoyment. —Thomas Parrish George Ella Lyon. Catalpa. Lexington, Kentucky: Wind Publications, 1993. 64 pages. $9.95. For the many people who know and love her poetry, the appearance of George Ella Lyon's Catalpa will be a happy and long overdue event; and for those readers who have yet to encounter Lyon's poems, what a treat you have in store. The book is divided into three sections; generally speaking, the first, firmly rooted in the Appalachians (Lyon grew up in Harlan, Kentucky), contains poems about grandparents and spiritual matters; the second, which has a more diverse geographical base, holds poems about parent and child, birthing and mothering, dying and death, individual and community; the third section, devoted to poems about Virginia Woolf, takes us to England—and beyond, for it reflects the poet's search for a literary mother. The first poem in the book, "Her Words," teaches a hard lesson: You gotta strap it on she would say to me . . . The title of the poem and that modest "me" in the second line indicate that Lyon has learned this hard lesson, but in her own way. For, while she does indeed "strap it on," the "it" she straps on is the weight and wisdom of another human soul. What is uniquely Lyon's here is the over-arching sense of the search, of yearning, of reaching to clasp elusive ghosts. As Part I turns a corner with "Stripped," moving into the territory of the spiritual ("Salvation," "A Testimony ," "The Foot-Washing"), this sense ofyearning increases. Like the "I" in "A Testimony," we are given the known and unknown, familiar and frightening, holy and unholy at once: Through the arc of green-fringed blue, a world I knew I was leaving, into the all of water, cold, [my daddy's] hands bore me down. 66 Part I has raised questions of the heart and spirit: how and where do we learn who we are? The questions are reframed in the title poem, "How the Letters Bloom Like a Catalpa Tree," which closes out Part I: "What could I send you?" the poet asks, since "you have read this / so many times . . . (There is a little mystery here, alongside the greater ones Lyon is probing: who is this "you" the poet so yearns to reach?) "What could I send you?" asks Lyon, and the answer blooms under her hands, magically, in the shape of Oaksie Caudill "making a white oak basket." The process of basket-making, like that of writing poems, is "this translating / of straight to curve, of fact to what we need." She makes it plainer yet, saying that Oaksie's trade is "tough as a poem for the burden that outlasts us, / for a heart leafed with words like a tree." And like Oaksie "bent to his wood-weaving," Lyon goes on in the poems of Part II to bring her mind to bear on questions tougher yet, questions of love and loss, of birth and death, of war and peace. Here Lyon does employ first person singular for the poet's own self; yet here, too, we are aware of this "I" reaching out to others, yearning to understand, to partake, to share the load. In "Looking at a Photograph of My Mother, Age 3," she says: [L]et me lift you. You can look like my son over my shoulder. I will hold you. And in poems about the birth of her second son and the death of her father, she muses on the meanings bound up in chromosomes, blood, and memory. In "Why," she answers her title question this way: Because wise blood remembers , my son who never knew you, links your hands behind him and walking, walks into you. Part III, comprised of "Lighthouse" and "Virginia Woolf," a suite of seven poems, might seem at first not to be part of the world we have glimpsed so far, but, because George Ella Lyon is grappling with the hard questions and their even harder answers, she makes us stretch our easy definitions of home and family. As...