| Kathryn
Stripling Byer – NC Poet Laureate
Kathryn Stripling Byer grew up in southwest Georgia, graduated
from Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, and earned her
Master of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina
at Greensboro, where she studied with Allen Tate, Fred Chappell,
and Robert Watson.
Her books of poetry include Catching Light (Louisiana State
University Press, 2002); Black Shawl (1998); Wildwood Flower
(1992), which was the 1992 Lamont Poetry Selection of The
Academy of American Poets; and The Girl in the Midst of
the Harvest (1986), which was published in the Associated
Writing Programs award series.
Coming
to Rest
"There is about [Byer's] lines something of the art
of the woodcut, a starkness made the more powerful by modesty
of presentation, a certain wintriness of aspect that cloaks
a smoldering sensibility. This is a mode, we might think,
that she does not choose but is chosen by." -Fred Chappell,
Shenandoah Taking as her touchstone poet Seamus Heaney's
verse "We come back emptied, / to nourish and resist
/ the words of coming to rest," Kathryn Stripling Byer
in these poems engages the contradictions inherent in the
act of coming home. She explores the step-by-step leaving
and returning-and finding "home" transformed because
of the journey.
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