Poetry Series
Our Heritage Remembered: Echoes of the Past January 24, 2008
Our Heritage Reclaimed: Living Connections in the Present February 28, 2008
Our Heritage Reborn: Visions of the Future April 24, 2008
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Peter Wright Stephanie Barrows
From Westport to Wakarusa
Our Past Re-Born 1/24/08
Event Review by Alison Reber
It was a frosty cold night but Signs of Life Books in downtown Lawrence was a rush of students gathering for what was probably their first real “study” session of the new semester. With microphone in hand and camera rolling, we launched the “From Westport to Wakarusa” poetry series January 24th, 2008. I’ve never envisioned myself at a poetry reading but by the end of the night I felt like I’d discovered a long-lost branch of my family tree.
Poets Stephanie Barrows, Amy Fleury, and Peter Wright, each have a style that tells us as much about their world view as the fabric they weave with their words. Together they cover distinct geographic and demographic facets of the Kansas River Valley.
Stephanie Barrows’ grew up in a part of the Kansas River Valley that gets relatively little media play - the forested far northeast. Her poems evoke images of cool shade-drenched summers, enormous trees, and a quiet quest for respect. Huge cottonwoods and sycamores seem like a refuge from urban Wyandotte County. In a sea of grass, Kansas’ forests have almost a lonely and rebellious quality that’s somehow analogous to Ms. Barrows’ poetry of person. In a nostalgic moment she tells us of her grandmother’s lemony tea balls and says, “Life is a river.”
Amy Fleury’s poems are a dramatic shift in psychic gears. A child of the Farm Crisis, she has a seldom heard earth sense filled with generations of rural life and seamed with criss-crossing matriarchs. Somehow she gets under and behind her poems, turning a moment in time into a three-dimensional collage, not unlike an Everlasting Gobstopper. For me the poems she read were close-your-eyes-and-feel-the-words-in-your-bones, beautiful words with often grim story lines. By using a narrative tone, she gives the reader just enough distance to avoid any permanent damage. In one poem she writes of that “yard (was) baked to puzzle pieces” and says that, “Heaven was a body of water.”
Peter Wright’s poems have looking glass observations that can only be made by someone who can compare and contrast places called “home.” He captures the breathlessly opaque Flint Hills sense of space - richness in the wintery sparse and pale. He’s fallen in love with “the enigma of no where in particular.” Occasionally he skips into rhythmic paces that mimic the rhythm of our everyday, routine life. The habits of people who have called here “home” romantically co-exist, and yet are separate from now. Mr. Wright’s words are laced with subtle meanings that turn political interpretations inside out. Environmental malaise blurs with social malaise. In one particularly powerful poem he writes that “the river is muddied with our fears.”
Delicious… and dangerously interesting.
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Our Heritage Reclaimed: Living Connections in the Present February 28, 2008
Oread Books - KU Bookstores, Kansas Union level 2, 1301 Jayhawk Blvd. Lawrence, KS 66045-7548 phone (785) 864-4640
Kansas Poet Laureate
University of Kansas
Dennis Etzel
MFA Candidate
Our Heritage Reborn: Visions of the Future April 24, 2008
