Catching Light (review)

Abstract

NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS REVIEWS Byer, Kathryn Stripling. Catching Light. Louisiana State University Press, 2002. 64 pages. Hardcover $22.95. Paper $15.95. Kathryn Stripling Byer's new collection of poems, Catching Light, is a three-sectioned book that works from a series of photographs entitled "Evelyn," as a kind of ekfrastic scrapbook or album of Appalachian and universal character: a woman dealing with aging and her concept of self, (from Greek, ekfrasis: art from other art, as poems inspired by paintings or photographs.) The first section, "In the Photograph Gallery," serves as prologue, consisting of a ten-part poem, wherein Byer gives us clues as to what she is doing as she takes us on this journey. In part 1, "I walk among photographs/ wondering who it is these people think/ I am."/ contains the poet's, and every woman's, dilemma: What is each woman as she goes from "hanging on to her mother's skirt" to the "little old lady," she herselfbecomes? In part 5, the persona steps outside herself, identifying with all who must dread what light sends back, "How many women/ have sat as I see myself/ sit in this car going/nowhere." By part 7 of the prologue, there is a resignation as well as a Dylanesque "rage against the dying of the light" when 'Evelyn' says, What a clutter my days have come down to. . . and later in the same poem, the whole of me waiting to go up in one burst of late afternoon torching everything. The precision and economy of language in that last line are part of the delight in this volume. The book's title describes what Byer does as artist: acting as camera catching the light, and stopping time in the special way peculiar to poetry, painting, and photography, and at the same time fleshing out her persona's, her, Everywoman's anxiety. 76 More than anything Catching Light is a treatise on self-seeing (selfknowledge ), catching and holding in the mind those things ofbeing and growing old, about being and aging. It is the clarity of Byer's particular observing that help her album capture the soul-saving elements of a life anywhere. She has caught and captured light, the surface enemy ofevery woman. And, if there is any doubt about her mission of self-knowledge, she tells us in "Old," the first poem after the prologue (section 2,): Now I worry the difference between what I see in this mirror and out there. But what does it matter? I look into both. See the same woman's life all around me. Catching Light is not death anxiety, letting go of the tight grip on life, or whining about losing one's youthful look in the mirror alone; it is the universal in the individual; it is, as she suggests in "Handiwork," giving up artificialities such as "lace as a way of ending/ things gracefully." The speaker, beginning to see lace everywhere, remembers sitting beside her mother who "...sat hooking circles/ of white thread"; now she rejects that tendency to blur the harsh ends and edges "...to prettify thresholds/ too suddenly come upon." Just as it is the vowels that give the Appalachian accent, as well as any accent, its distinction, it is the physical details of the poems that give Catching Light its Appalachian flavor. If there is a weakness in this book, some might say it is in the predictability of some details: "stove's blackbelly," "wind whistling through the house," "seersucker dresses," "blossoming okra plants," "back roads/ . . .going nowhere." One could argue that the insights gained using such details far outweigh any tedium. See for instance, the last few lines of "Letting," "Fallow," and especially the beginning of "Her Porch": "Here she would pour outher hair/ from her Sunday hat/ and sit rocking the sermon away." It is the necessary commonality of such details, in poem or photograph, that conjures mountain grandmother ghosts for male or female readers. For me, section 3 is the most powerful. In poems such as "Wedding," "Nemesis," and "Sleepless," I feel, to paraphrase one of Byer's images, bound to blood. But it is "Dark Hour" that resonates in the...