THE GIFT OF POETRY FOR THE HOLIDAYS: Isabel Zuber's "Red Lily"

My friend Isabel Zuber has been writing poetry for many years. When I met her in 1977 at the Critz Writers Retreat with A.R. Ammons in Virginia, we felt an immediate bond. Isabel also wrote fiction, which I didn't know till a little later. She has published a novel, Salt, with Picador. Among her admirers are Ron Rash, Lee Smith, and Fred Chappell. Ron Rash considers SALT a novel that has not received the attention it deserves, that it will come to be seen as one of the best Appalachian novels from this period.

It's poetry, though, that I want to talk about today, because RED LILY, a collection of many of the poems Isabel has written over the years, has been published by Press 53 in Winston-Salem, NC. This is a splendid press, managed with energy and vision by Kevin Watson. And RED LILY is a splendid book. I am sharing some of favorite poems from this collection, so that you will be enticed to order copies for gifts, and if you don't already have a copy for yourself, then, what are you waiting for? Go to www.press53.com and click on all the right links to make your purchase.

Isabel was born and grew up in Boone, North Carolina, when it was a small town with few traffic problems. She graduated from Appalachian State University and received a master’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She has been a librarian, a small press publisher, a gardener, an inventive vegetarian cook, and a homemaker. She has served on the boards of the North Carolina Writers Network, the Salem College Center for Women Writers, and the Grassy Creek Neighborhood Alliance. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared inPoetry, The American Voice, The Small Farm, The Greensboro Review, The Arts Journal, Now and Then, Pembroke Magazine, The Laurel Review, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Sandhills Review, Cave Wall, and other magazines. She has published two collections of poetry,Oriflamb, which won the North Carolina Writers Network chapbook prize, and Winter’s Exile, poems for her father. Her novel Salt was published by Picador in 2002 and was given the First Novel Award from Virginia Commonwealth University that year. She has received a Forsyth County Arts Council grant and, in 2009, a North Carolina Arts Council fellowship.

SOLSTICE

Longest night

the sacred sweep

from light to dark,

dark to light.

We draw the rhythm

of our breath

rise, fall, ease, flow.




In the kitchen

a woman sings

hymns of another

time, an earlier

faith, and a winter

rose blooms on

the window sill.

NIGHTWARD

A last enormous freedom

is to run into the dark,

barely enough day left

to see vague hydrangeas

massed along the drive and junipers up like spears

against the sky. Bound then in the dusk with all that

can be there light says is not.

Rush the yard on grass-lashed,

bug-bit legs, turn round

and round till stars collide

with spires, breaking the

huge dinning noise

of all those tiny voices. Such venture is less, or more,

than brave, for dew’s sweet

or bitter, and there’s always

the lighted doorway and

the sense that if one runs

far and hard enough

there are arms in the darkness also.

Guided, a Path

My fields, he said, my land
and increase for my kind,
flung his arms over rows and rows
of autumn gathering
under a sharp, clear sky,

but the downward beckoned.
When someone waved in silence
from the edge of the woods
he went to see, following
the bare curved track

through yellowed stubble
into forest, into soundless dark
and then, seduced, he never stopped,
not even when leaves,
trees, branches, light

all vanished and
she came in gold
bearing a cradle
under a silken weaving
of webbed and circling flowers.

Lifting a corner, the golden beast
showed him the infant curled
inside, small, glowing, no
shape he could name
and yet he knew

contained therein
was all he had ever been
and all that he would be again
and that everything
every thing is kin.

Bane and Simples

A current physic
curses me, administered
without trial, insight,

for recovery or else.
I war among prescriptions,
tear off labels, jumble

pills. It doesn't matter.
Some remedy or other
will seek me. I can't hide.

Old practitioner,
wherever you believe,
is cure there? In plant,

dull bone, grass,
hank of hair, a touch,
the outlawed prayer?

They

After we had destroyed them all
we came to worship their art,
would sit for hours in conquered, fretted
doorways to watch the play of fountains
on paved courtyards, fondling the while
those carved stone dogs. We wrapped ourselves
in sinuous robes of a fabric we could
not name, hid our rough invaders' faces
behind bland masks with narrow plucked brows.
The smoke of pipes polished as water
curled from our nostrils. We drank
the bitterest, the most severe of all
their remedies, forgot our own memories.
Flute, drums moved our bodies in dances
we never made and in time we prayed
to the very gods who could not save them.

When the Queen

When the queen hurried to
the garden to plead for
her life her judges were

nearly assembled, a
cold stone whetting an edge.
Heads of tall gaudy gay

dahlias nodded beside
the thyme-scented path. By
stifling then a private

theology she put
hand to her embroidered
heart, swore eternal faith,

and spoke so fair she saved
herself while her soul shrank
to the size of a fine

silver thimble. Something,
she thought, almost that small
could hold all of her blood.