Byer's 'Catching Light' searches for language of aging

By Lynn Hotaling

While viewing Louanne Watley's photographs, the Evelyn Series, Byer wrote several lines of poetry that became part of "Catching Light's" opening poem.

"'Who is she?' / a child hanging on to her mother's skirt / asks, as if she is frightened / by what she sees. 'Just a little old lady,' / her mother soothes. / 'That's all she is.'"

"I imagined the model looking at herself," Byer said. "It seemed a good framework to get the book going and consider what aging does to a woman's sense of identity."

As she worked on the poems, Byer said she remembered what Irish poet Eavan Boland said about how hard it is for a woman to write about aging and old age.

"I was thinking about that and wondering how difficult it would be to get into the mind of an old woman," Byer said.

Byer envisioned the woman in the poems as "feisty," she said.

"I wanted her to be able to look at what's ahead and spit in its eye," Byer said. "Of course she's afraid, but I didn't want her to be spooked." To illustrate the point, Byer quoted from one of her new poems, "Dark Hour."

"I know I'm surrounded, / But I'm in no hurry to lay down / my fork and be bullied, / or spooked, / by Night's blank windows / shining my ghost aces back at me / when I look straight through / myself into darkness / before I extinguish the lights."

The book's title came after the poems were written, Byer said.

"I started out with 'Moment of Light,' but that seemed too passive," she said. "'Catching Light' is active. While literally you can't capture light, you can attempt to. And that's really what art is - an attempt to catch light, catch a moment, though you can't ever do it completely."

Another reason she settled on "Catching Light," Byer said, was that she wanted a title that played on the photographs as well as on Evelyn's attempt to capture light each day.

"Soon her days begin to catch light," Byer said. "This woman knows she's near the end of life, but she's still hungry - still trying to catch the light."

Byer, who received the 2001 North Carolina Award in Literature and the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets for her 1992 collection, "Wildwood Flower," is garnering high praise for her new book.

"The light that Byer's 'Catching Light' is suffused with is the light of the past. Grandmothers and ghosts move through these strong yet delicate lyrics as the poet comes to terms with her own aging," writes poet Linda Pastan. "Byer could be describing these poems when she writes: 'words streaming onto the ivory vellum / like blue tributaries.'"

A lifelong resident of the rural South, Byer writes "poems that are stirring and haunting, particularly when she gives voice to the women of Appalachia," according to the citation Byer received last year from Gov. Mike Easley.

Though born and raised in south Georgia, Byer has lived most of her adult life in Jackson County. A graduate of Wesleyan College in Macon, Ga., she earned a master of fine arts degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Studying with regional author Fred Chappell at UNC-G focused her emphasis on poetry, Byer said.

"I connected more with poetry," said Byer, who initially envisioned herself a prose writer. "I felt more of a distinctive voice and felt there was more I could say with poetry - it interested me more."

A poem can distill a story or an emotion in a way nothing else can, Byer said.

"Something that's really inarticulate can be distilled (in a poem)," Byer said. "Poetry is the loss of what you love - of trying to recall the essence of a person or memory."

Her first poetry collection, 1982's "The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest," was her attempt to create her own "personal mythology," Byer said. Based on her memories of childhood and the experiences of her early married life, those poems were her attempt to discover what really mattered in her life, she said.

"Wildwood Flower," her second book, was "a way of writing about being (in the mountains) - trying to find a voice for being here," said Byer, who came to Western Carolina University to teach English in 1968.

Byer described her third collection, "Black Shawl," as a "spillover" from "Wildwood Flower."

"I was still haunted by the idea of women's voices roaming the mountains," Byer said.

U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins selected "Black Shawl" to receive the Brockman-Campbell Book Award, given annually to the best poetry book by a North Carolinian. The collection also received the Roanoke-Chowan Award from the N.C. Literary and Historical Association.

Two of Byer's poems, both from "Wildwood Flower," have been included as prologues to regional novels. Lee Smith chose "Weep-Willow" to open "Fair and Tender Ladies," and Isabel Zuber used "Empty Glass" in her recent novel, "Salt."

Both "Wildwood Flower" and "Black Shawl" received acclaim from other authors.

"The fact is that (Byer's) poems are absolutely necessary to me, to my sense of how to live in this world. Byer is a writer of haunting beauty and great wisdom," Smith wrote.

"It is impossible to praise too highly Byer's lovely and genuine 'Wildwood Flower.' Here are voices that have been wrung into marvelous poetry by a world whose very dangers hold a dread beauty. Here indeed is the heart's own book," wrote Chappell.

"'Black Shawl' is a spirited and spirit-haunted book of poems that interlaces folklore and cultural mythology with the myths of the self... These poems are at once old and new, archetypal and freshly minted," Collins wrote.

Byer, who will read from her work at 7:30 p.m. Friday, April 26, at City Lights, lives in Cullowhee with her husband, Jim, who serves as head of the WCU English Department. They have one daughter, Cory, who is also a published poet and writer.

Back to Archive: 04/18/02.