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Kathryn Stripling Byer. Coming to Rest. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2006. 63 pages. Hardback $45.00. Trade paperback $16.95. Thisnew collectionbyNorthCarolina'sPoetLaureateoffersreaders a splendid variety of subject matter, tone and poetic forms. The book's thirty-six poems (along with an untitled "song" that concludes the second of its three parts) address such topics as family relationships and home, memory, mortality, "the old hymn of April" as Byer writes in "I Listen" (12), and the power of "language [to] raise the world up / from the grave of our common amnesia" (56). In "Nets," she notes how "Line / for the caveman worked / magic" in its depiction ofbison and mammoth; the same can be said for many of Byer's own lines. The title of Part 1, "Again," announces the volume's emphasis on memory and on the motif of return, both literal and figurative. The epigraphtothis sectioncomes fromSeamusHeaney's "The Birthplace," lines that give Byer's book its title and a good share of its thematic focus: We come back emptied, to nourish and resist the words of coming to rest: birthplace, roofbeam, whitewash, flagstone, hearth. (1) "Home" is a key term in this collection, occurring in at least twenty different poems, including the opening poem, "Coastal Plain," which speaks of "Home that calls / / and calls / and calls" (4) and which uses couplets of identical rhyme as if to mirror, stanza by stanza, the movement of return. In the five-part title poem, Byer displays her skill with both traditional forms and free verse by including a villanelle, a sonnet and a ghazal. The final seven of the twelve poems in Part 1 deal with experiences involving the poet's daughter Corinna, to whom Coming to Rest is dedicated, experiences that range from infancy to Cory's twenty-first birthday. The final poem in Part 1, "Chicago Bound," with its portrait of an airplane flight to that city, where Cory awaits her parents' visit to celebrate her birthday, provides a skillful transition to Part 2, which utilizes the journey motif in fifteen poems describing a trip to the westernUnited States and the poet's subsequent return home. 87 Entitled "Singing to Salt Woman," Part 2 is unified not only by the motif of the journey but also by water imagery. Here the term "home" recurs often, but Byer also inquires, "what's native now?" (28), a question she responds to in "Zuni," the central poem in Part 2, in which she remarks: Maybe native means nothing if not our own way of recovering, back to the first wind that quickened it, what we call home----- (33) The legend of Salt Woman cited in "Zuni" takes readers back to what the poem's closing lines call "a creation story / whose ripples keep cnreading / beyond comprehension" (33). Byer again invokes the mytnu^w. a,„118? 0f tne human imagi«**™, in "Edge of Plains," a poemthat contrasts tue1,^^nnnnS' visionof a "heavenly ?ß?-ow with the Anasazi's embrace of "earthly / repose" (35). Just as the trajectory of the airplane in "Chicago Bound" is earthward ("if it's down / there on earth where you are, / it's Sweet Home," says the poet to Corinna), so the trajectory of Byer's poetic vision in Part 2 comes to rest on the images of a linen tablecloth settling over a table and of Alice Mathews, Byer's former colleague at Western Carolina University to whom the poems in Part 2 are dedicated, delighting in the sight and smell and taste of raspberries. Part 3, "Closer," contains just ten poems, yet all but the last run longerthan any ofthepoems inPart2. This section's title invites readers to ask, "Closer to what?" Among many possible answers, two seem prominent: closer to death, to the sense of mortality that haunts many of these poems, and closer to home, whether home denotes a particular place or the recovery of one's past or ultimate union with the life force manifest on "the dawn of the first morning" (35). The epigraph to Part 3 refers to "the call / and response of memory" (41), and this section's opening poem, "The Still Here and Now," recollects the poet's first day as...

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