A
Wild Region: Poems & Paintings
by Kate Buckley
Foreword by Cecilia Woloch
Click
here to purchase a copy of
A Wild Region
(Moon Tide Press, 2008)
*Listen
to Kate read from & discuss A Wild Region
*Click here to see paintings featured
in the book
*Click here to read selected poems
from the book
Praise for A Wild Region:
"A ribbon of Appalachia winds through Kate Buckley’s
vigorous voice in her debut collection of poems, A Wild
Region. It was my pleasure to choose her as the winner
of the 2008 James Hearst Poetry Prize for the North American
Review, and it is an equal pleasure to welcome this
book of poems, crafted from the patterns of speech of the
wild region Buckley loves and the wildness of its people,
too."
— Molly Peacock
"Kate Buckley's poems are dark prayers and lyrical
ballads, infused with mystery and awe... And the stories
these poems tell — finely crafted as the poems are — are
stories that speak to all of us, accessible and clear for
all their complicated depth, 'universal' precisely because
they're so deeply personal, and so deeply felt. There is
so much stunning language in this collection, so much accuracy
and grace, and there are so many images that take my breath
away... Kate Buckley shows us how the beautiful and the
brutal can not only coexist alongside one another, but exist
within one another. Hers is a necessary and welcome new
voice."
— Cecilia Woloch
"A Wild Region is a family history in verse
as well as a lovely elegy for Buckley's grandmother set
in a Kentucky that is both pastoral and industrial: 'I have
ridden on horseback / under the harvest moon, gold and heavy'
vs. 'the coughs that stained your linens black / no matter
how many times you bleached them...' The elegies are especially
moving: 'her wispy hair, fine as floss / cotton against
the pale earth of her skull' and 'I cradle her, cradle her,
and rock her home.' Pick up this book. (Buckley won this
year's Hearst Poetry Prize.)"
— Vince Gotera, North American Review
"Many of the poems recall the work of poet Andrew Hudgins,
both for their subject matter and use of forms. Perhaps
these rhythms are a kind of heritage of the song and music
of the culture that feature heavily in their poetry. Like
Hudgins, Buckley can convey the physical and emotional violence
of characters without apology, presenting people as they
were and laying bare their choices without too much explanation...
W.H. Auden once said “a poem is like a story . . . with
all the boring parts left out.” Buckley certainly has many
stories to tell... And she is a gifted storyteller... Perhaps,
this is Buckley’s intent in many of her poems -- to take
the chaotic and random pieces and make them fit, make them
record a life, like a handmade quilt. Buckley’s poems are
as beautiful and well-crafted."
— Allison Elliott, The Adirondack Review
"This is a book of poems full of clues—clues
more satisfying even than answers, since they point us toward
the wilder regions of the complex human heart. Like a heady
night in the rural South, these poems are sonorous, delicious,
and dark—at once comforting and mysterious, wicked
and sweet."
— Robert Peake
"True to her Kentucky roots, Kate Buckley is a
born storyteller with a poet’s transforming vision of the
world’s details informed by loss and exile."
— Julie Kuzneski Wrinn for the Betty Gabehart Prize,
Kentucky Women Writers Conference
Selected Poems from A Wild Region:
Rue
Sun filters through skeleton palms,
dank water licks lazily at shoreline,
tortoises sleep their green hill dreams.
Swampland sings its stuck-mud staccato,
shaded path winds around the lake
over and over to its starting place,
the way a road takes us
where we no longer want to go.
Repentance does not undo what has been done,
and grass tramped by heavy boots
soon springs back.
There is truth in vengeance,
in the flowering over and over
of evil deeds
until they have gone to seed,
withered in hoarfrost ground.
Laurel
County
There must have been times
Kentucky seemed a life sentence,
a dark-veined monster burning coal in her belly,
the coughs that stained your linens black
no matter how many times you bleached them back
by the creek where you caught crawdads for supper.
You tell me of life but do not mention hunger,
you speak instead of land: tramping the fields in the wake
of your father,
finding a fishing hole or story, and the last time you saw
him,
Pappaw told you how Granddaddy got killed by a train,
cut in two on his way to the Hensley place
—
this, during Prohibition, and a man did what he could.
Your mother canned beans and berries
from the share-cropped fields behind the house.
I remember the jam, thick and expensive on Wonder Bread.
I never understood why you'd fix me with thundercloud eyes
if I did not finish my piece,
your Cherokee granny's picture glaring from the other room.
You made a kite for me once, weaving far into the night
a red tailed hawk with scarlet ribbons streaming like entrails
against the gray Kentucky sky.
I ran and ran,
legs fighting my lungs —
could not let it fall.
You were on the hilltop - skirt taut,
caught between your legs, signaling something,
I could not make out what,
the kite obscuring my vision —
the wind would catch it, then let it fall.
When
We Were Young
I was always the darker one,
dusky as a gypsy my Granny said,
with cat-colored eyes,
legs longer than was good for me,
always bruised from climbing trees,
my
sister, china eyed,
skin paler than any moon —
smooth as the jazz
our parents played late at night
after we'd gone to bed.
I saw
them once
moving slowly into each other
against the pale August night,
his dark hand on her shoulder,
her laughter, the brightest sound
I have ever known,
sailing up and over
lighting every candle in the room.
Miner's
Pond
I sit on the bank, hand on dog's domed head,
finger the copper curls blazing in the last hour of daylight.
We are waiting for release.
There are faded vines still clinging to the hillside,
breathless sun choking dust-strewn air,
motes swimming in August sky.
We are waiting for the haunting that fades
come September, chill chasing away fetid mist,
whorls like damp ghosts in flattened grasses,
leaving behind nothing so much as sap singing,
scarlet creeping through every vein,
until at last we crawl to the shore and sleep.
