Wildwood Flower: Poems

by Kathryn Stripling Byer

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807117714
• ISBN13: 9780807117712
• Release Date: October 1992
• Publisher: LSU Press
• Length: 68 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.5" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Great poems

I think you should seriously consider removing Publisher Weekly's review; this is a very good selection of poems. The poet's word choice seems so natural. The poems' sequence of words seem inevitable and the writing is beautiful and appears effortless. The themes are accessible but not cliched. These are not screeching confessional poems, nor do they contain the so-called words of the street ("f...", sh..." etc) It is becoming a cliche but the review by Publisher Weekly almost certainly stems from east coast bias. Highly recommend her poetry along with that of Betty Adcock and David Mason. Good poetry is being written in the U.S.; too bad that you have to read reviews by Fred Chappell to discover it.

Publishers Weekly is off the mark!

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.

Wildwood Flower Sings!

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.

A voice from the blue Ridge Mountains

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.