Post by shayepoet on Jul 22, 2008 18:39:50 GMT 2
Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods
Paula Bohince
Paula Bohince’s debut collection, Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods, begins with a speaker invoking her dead father and unfolds as a kind of mystery novel. Spanning decades, and set on a decrepit, inherited farm in Pennsylvania, the daughter and father navigate the poverty of their environment and their own troubled relationship. Details of the father’s murder are gradually uncovered, and we eventually learn that he was killed by a trusted laborer. The speaker lives with this violence, on the farm as an adult, while contending with her own fears, the fallibility of memory, and the voices of ancestors who once occupied this homestead.
Piety within shades of pantheism—that is clearly one way to look at Paula Bohince’s Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods. Bohince is, however, more naturalist than romantic, meaning that her poems above all honor their dark side, their realism, their edge. These are country matters here, incidents in the male American tradition of Frost, Sherwood Anderson, and James Wright, a fact of gender that not only distinguishes this poet’s pastoral concerns but separates their power.
-- Stanley Plumly
Sample poem:
Clinging
The dirty sheep cried all night for her mate. In her stall,
a comprehensible world of straw, mushrooms bluish in manure,
long hoof prints of her husband yesterday shuttled away
with three others. This, and the stubborn feathers of the grouse—
lilac, blue-black where it was hit. I’m here too, stripping
the bird of her magic: upside-down, she swings by the feet,
crease of blood on her neck, locket of heart rapt inside her breast.
Over still-wet fields, the lucky ones hobble toward the illusion
of safety that woods allow, while the quills of the dead one
seem to dig in deeper, as if clinging saves anyone.
Raves and Reviews for Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods:
"Many of the reviews of this book say that Bohince's collection of poetry reads like a mystery, and yes, I guess you could say that. But what I am truly fascinated with is how Bohince creates emotion through the details of rural Pennsylvania. Since I am from rural Pennsylvania, I can really appreciate her sense of place -- but I also appreciate the spooky -- and do I dare say this -- almost Gothic feeling in her works. Anyone looking for a great summer poetry read should check out this collection."
– Karen J. Weyant, in The Scrapper Poet, 2008/07/07
"In exploring the “drift between the missing and the dead,” Paula Bohince carves beauty from the harsh complexities of suffering and survival, the chronic hardships and traumatic incidents woven into the narratives of family and place. Bound uneasily at times to human experience, animal consciousness is also a vital part of Bohince’s reckoning; even a sheep in its “comprehensible world of straw” and the “approximate bones of a field mouse” warrant her attention—and ours. Skillfully rendered, Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods is a remarkable debut."
—Claudia Emerson
"Paula Bohince writes from the intersection of the human and natural worlds—and she cannot afford to be sentimental about either. Free of decoration and gimmick, these are poems born of urgency and honesty: their truths are hard-won, and deeply instructive. Hers is a clear-sighted tenderness born of living fully and deeply in our complex, worn, and beautiful world."
—Jane Mead
About the author:
Paula Bohince was born in 1976 and grew up in rural Pennsylvania. Her poems appear widely in such publications as Agni, Ploughshares, Slate, Southwest Review, and The Yale Review. She has been the recipient of the “Discovery”/The Nation Award, the Grolier Poetry Prize, residencies from the MacDowell Colony, and artist’s grants from the Puffin Foundation and the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation. She has taught at New York University, the New School, and elsewhere and was the University of Mississippi’s inaugural Summer Poet-in-Residence. In 2008, she was the Amy Clampitt Resident Fellow in Lenox, Massachusetts: the first woman to hold this fellowship. She lives in Pennsylvania.
ISBN: 978-1-932511-62-8, 71 pages, $14.95
Sarabande Books, July 1, 2008
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