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 Kate Buckley and A Wild Region:
"A ribbon of Appalachia winds through Kate Buckleys
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 tellfinely
crafted as the poems areare
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.' Interspersed are the
poet's own paintings, similarly patterened: pale impressionist
shimmers plus brusque expressionist impasto. The elegies
are especially moving: 'her wisy 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.)
North American Review
"Painting and poetry are two art forms that stand side
by side and work well together. A Wild Region is
a collection of oil paintings and poetry from prolific poet
Kate Buckley, whose work has appeared in countless venues.
Many of her poems are opposite full color art, adding a
fresh dimension to her work. A Wild Region is a
fine blend of artforms, highly recommended. 'On Hearing
Your News': My eyes lie flat in my skull,/darkened, bruised//lashes
whip-stitched to swollen lids/sleep
has once again been elusive.//My organs weigh more/than
they did the day before,/swollen with unhappiness,/gorged
with regret:/tiny fists in my stomach pummeling/ the hanging
ball of my heart."
Midwest
Book Review
(Reviewer's
Choice)
"Many
of the poems recall the work of poet Andrew Hudgins, both
for their subject matter and use of forms... 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, of birth and deaths, abandonment and murder. And
she is a gifted storyteller... Perhaps, this is Buckley’s
intent in many of her poemsto
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."
The Adirondack Review
"Kate Buckley's A Wild Region, exemplifies
what is best about American poetry: honest, clear, fluid,
and genuine. A Wild Region, is a strong debut collection
that deserves a place on every poet's bookshelf.
Marie C. Lecrivain
"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 poets transforming vision of the
worlds details informed by loss and exile."
Julie Kuzneski Wrinn for the Betty Gabehart Prize
"In A Wild Region, Kate Buckley explores the
connections between landscape, memory and history...Buckley's
style is perfect for this task."
Poetix.net:
Poetry for Southern California
"Buckley is a firm believer in the value of the myths
and legends that have been handed down through time and
that reveal essential truths about who we are, providing
a common thread of humanity that links past, present and
future generations. She tries to give a sense of that in
her poetry. So that while the poems in her book are set
in her native Kentucky and are evocative of the hard and
often desperate lives of Appalachian people to whom black
lung and hunger were all too familiar, she emphasizes that
they are indicative of a collective experiencestories
of love and loss that everyone can relate to."
Laguna
Beach Independent
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 hilltopskirt
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.
