The South Carolina Book Festival will be held Feb. 27-28 at the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center in Columbia.  This poem is part of a three-week series of poem posts running in advance of the festival, a preview of some of the South Carolina poets reading at the festival this year.  The poems have been selected by local poet and USC professor Ed Madden.

The final selection from the new batch of chapbooks published by the South Carolina Poetry Initiative and Stepping Stones Press this year is Ashley Mace Havird’s Dirt Eaters, one of the six winners in the 2008 chapbook contest.

As I noted earlier, this series has been such a great publishing venture for South Carolina.  Since the contest began in 2005, the series has introduced us to the work of South Carolina poets, work by established writers, such as Gil Allen and Libby Bernardin, as well as new voices like Anne Soni and Melissa Johnson.

Havird, unfortunately, won’t be able to make the festival this year, but her book will be for sale along with others in the prize series -- and it is a stunning little book.  Havird grew up on a tobacco farm in Marion County in the 1960s, and she has just finished a novel set in the landscape as well.  Her poems are filled with rich descriptions of Southern landscapes, Southern folk ritual, family histories.  Series editor Kwame Dawes says, “She finds in the rituals of lived folk existence, metaphors to explain the complex stages of life.”

The title poem, “Dirt Eaters,” for example, tells how Delta women used to make a “silty tea” from mud dauber nests to ease childbirth.  When her own daughter leaves home, the poem’s speaker finds herself cleaning everything, including the window screens caked with dauber nests, the poem concluding, “The nest-dust salts my eyes, / grits my tongue.”  (I love Havird’s language, descriptions thick with consonants -- poems you want to read aloud.)

In “Marion County,” the speaker refers to “this insect-change, / wormholing into midlife,” and part of the rich strangeness of this chapbook is its bestiary of bugs -- ants worrying a dead cockroach to bits, spiders draping a cemetery angel, horseflies, fire ants, mud daubers.  I suppose it is the mosquito-ridden South, but like those muddaubers of a midlife crisis, her insects insist on a world of transformation.  In a burnt horse carcass, we find “the bloom, the luminous worm.”  The book is filled with such stunning natural images -- like a hawk that has “gutted that fat blue jay, working its talons like crochet hooks.”

 

Family history also plays an important part in this book -- WW1 photographs, a grandfather’s gas mask.  One of my favorites is “After the Funeral, Into the Swamp.”

 

 

AFTER THE FUNERAL, INTO THE SWAMP

 

The scent of wild lilies rises.

Knowing where they hide, I go down

through wild grape and pokeberry, down

to the pond’s black-edge mud. There

in almost no sunlight,

white star-shapes that smell . . . why, heavenly.

I pluck a handful, bury my face.

 

My grandfather’s arms life me

and my sap-dripping lilies high

above the briars and muck,

onto his shoulders.

Pollen streaks my fingers. I taste,

expecting the sweet yellow of honey,

the dry no-taste of dust.

(Originally appeard in Dirt Eaters, by Ashley Mace Havird.  Columbia SC: Stepping Stones Press, 2009.  This poem, along with others from the South Carolina Poetry Initiative Chapbook Series, used with permission of The South Carolina Poetry Initiative.)

A South Carolina native, Havird now lives in Shreveport, Louisiana.  Her works has been published in many journals, including The Southern Review and Southern Humanities Review.  A recipient of a Louisiana Division of the Arts Fellowship as well as Shreveport Regional Arts Council Fellowships, Havird has taught creative writing at Centenary College of Louisiana, the University of Virginia’s Division of Continuing Education, and the Renzi Education and Art Center in Shreveport.