Fable in the Blood: The Selected Poems of Byron Herbert Reece
By Byron Herbert Reece and Jim Clark
4/5
()
About this ebook
Collected here are poems by one of Georgia's most intriguing and talented poets of the twentieth century. Byron Herbert Reece was born in Union County, Georgia, in 1917 and authored four volumes of poems and two novels during his short lifetime. Until now, many of his poems, originally published in the 1940s and 1950s, have been out of print. Reece, who faithfully assumed responsibility for his family's farm when his parents became ill, was never a poet of the academic ivory tower. Indeed, he rebelled against the rising New Criticism associated with the Vanderbilt Fugitives, the elite of southern poetry at that time.
Reece's work reflects both the devastating impact of his parents' death from tuberculosis and his own affliction with the disease, which caused him to distance himself from others: "A solitary thing am I / Upon the roads of rust and flame / That thin at sunset to the air." Reece was also preoccupied with his ambivalence toward the farm, which sustained his solitude yet took time away from his writing: "In the far, dark woods go roving / And find there to match your mood / A kindred spirit moving / Where the wild winds blow in the wood." Reece's poetry is resonant and contemplative, and Jim Clark has included here works that speak for the true grace of Reece's talent. In addition, Clark's attentive introduction should bring increased interest to this notable southern poet.
Byron Herbert Reece
BYRON HERBERT REECE was a lifelong resident of the north Georgia mountains. An author whose work is closely tied to the spirit and traditions of Appalachia, he wrote two novels: The Hawk and the Sun and Better a Dinner of Herbs (Georgia). In addition, Reece was the author of four highly acclaimed volumes of poetry.
Related to Fable in the Blood
Related ebooks
An Advent Alphabet: Daily Readings from William Stringfellow Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsToughing It Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/530 Eternal Masterpieces of Humorous Stories (Golden Deer Classics) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDescent into Hell Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Works of John Greenleaf Whittier, Complete Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJIM DAVIS: Thrilling Escapade of a Daring Hero on a Dangerous Sea Mission (All-Time Favourite Children's Classics) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSummary of Ghosted by Nancy French: An American Story Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFrom There to Here: Selected Poems and Translations Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGrab and Grace or It's the Second Step - Companion and Sequel to The House by the Stable Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsReal Characters: A Tip of the Hat to Nonconformity Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWhy We Love Middle-earth: An Enthusiast's Book about Tolkien, Middle-earth, and the LotR Fandom Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsUnexpected Abundance: The Fruitful Lives of Women without Children Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBen-Hur: A Tale of the Christ Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Able McLaughlins Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGetting on Toward Home: And Other Sermons by the River Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Quid without Any Quo: Gospel Freedom according to Galatians Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore: Open and Degrees of Nakedness Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Theater of God's Glory: Calvin, Creation, and the Liturgical Arts Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPastor: A Fictional Reminiscence--With Conversations on Religion and Society Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMoment to Moment: Poems of a Mountain Recluse Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Nicholas Nickleby Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Campbell's Kingdom Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Over The Teacups Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Pilgrims' Way from Winchester to Canterbury Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIn the Beauty of Holiness: Art and the Bible in Western Culture Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Wonderful Words of Life: Hymns in American Protestant History and Theology Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Parnassus on Wheels Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Journey to the Empty Tomb Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Mill on the Floss Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Flannery O'Connor's Why Do the Heathen Rage?: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Work in Progress Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Poetry For You
The Odyssey: (The Stephen Mitchell Translation) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tao Te Ching: A New English Version Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Iliad: The Fitzgerald Translation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dante's Divine Comedy: Inferno Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Iliad of Homer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Sun and Her Flowers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Bell Jar: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Inward Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Prophet Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Dante's Inferno: The Divine Comedy, Book One Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Selected Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beowulf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Twenty love poems and a song of despair Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Leaves of Grass: 1855 Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gilgamesh: A New English Version Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Way Forward Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Canterbury Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Poems That Make Grown Men Cry: 100 Men on the Words That Move Them Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFor colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Collection Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Daily Stoic: A Daily Journal On Meditation, Stoicism, Wisdom and Philosophy to Improve Your Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Collection of Poems by Robert Frost Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bedtime Stories for Grown-ups Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Pretty Boys Are Poisonous: Poems Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Beyond Thoughts: An Exploration Of Who We Are Beyond Our Minds Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Complete Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Love Her Wild: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for Fable in the Blood
1 rating0 reviews
Book preview
Fable in the Blood - Byron Herbert Reece
Fable in the Blood
Fable in the Blood
THE SELECTED POEMS OF
BYRON HERBERT REECE
Edited by Jim Clark
Paperback edition, 2019
© 2002 by the University of Georgia Press
Athens, Georgia 30602
All rights reserved
Designed by Betty Palmer McDaniel
Set in 11.5 on 14 Centaur
Most University of Georgia Press titles are
available from popular e-book vendors.
Printed digitally
The Library of Congress has cataloged the
hardcover edition of this book as follows:
Reece, Byron Herbert, 1917–1958.
[Poems. Selections]
Fable in the blood : the selected poems of Byron Herbert Reece / edited by Jim Clark.
xlii, 185 p. ; 23 cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. xli-xlii).
ISBN 0-8203-2347-0 (alk. paper)
I. Clark, Jim, 1954– II. Title.
PS3535.E245 A6 2002
811'.54—dc21 2001042447
The Tree, the Bird, and the Leaf
courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book & Manu script Library, University of Georgia Libraries.
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-8203-5542-9
Contents
Preface
Introduction
FROM Ballad of the Bones (1945)
Ballad of the Bones
Fox Hunters of Hell
Lest the Lonesome Bird
Ballad of the Rider
Ballad of the Weaver
A Song of Sorrow
All the Leaves in the Wildwood
If Only Lovers
Bitter Berry
Mountain Fiddler
Invocation
I Am the Dust
In the Mind’s Meadow
House in the Wind
We Shall Not Eat
The Harvest: 1942
Query in This Year of Our Lord
The Dawn Came Down
Summer
Whose Eye Is on the Sparrow
Autumn Mood
Year’s Ending
Seasonal
I Go by Ways of Rust and Flame
Song after Harvest
Boy and Deer
Monochord
Address to the Heart
FROM Bow Down in Jericho (1950)
The Larks at the Meeting of David and Jonathan
The Crows at the Parting of David and Jonathan
The Remembrance of Jonathan
The Adoration
John: A New Testament Ballad
The Riddles
The Fable in the Blood
I’ll Do As Much for My True-Love
Ballad of the Bride and Groom
The Farewell
The Generations of Thought
When First I Fared Upon the Road
The Travelers
Roads
Of an Old Bone I Was Bred
Loath Is the Leaf
O Where Is Charlie Langford Gone
The Spearmen the Bowmen the Archers
A Rural Air
We Could Wish Them a Longer Stay
Now to the Fields
The Speechless Kingdom
Feathers and Fur
Therefore the Mote
The Mower
I Looked into a Dead Man’s Fields
In the Far Dark Woods Go Roving
Good-By
The Country Housewife Tells a Rosary
Gathers Again to Shining
Three Times Already I Have Outwitted Death
FROM A Song of Joy (1952)
A Song of Joy
The Weaver
The Service of Song
From Whence Is Song
A Song for Breath
Pandora, When We Come to Choose
To Market, to Market
If Evil Were a Little Road
I Know a Valley Green with Corn
There Never Was Time
The Elm and the Moon
My Love It Is Twain
Fruiting
The Shaggy Hills of Hughly
Country Autumn
A Certain Essence of the Sun
When I Think of Christmas Time
Three Epigraphs:
I: For Bow Down in Jericho
II: For Better a Dinner of Herbs
III: For Ballad of the Bones
FROM The Season of Flesh (1955)
In the Corridor
The Betrothed from the Grave
The Disparates
The Cycle
The Stay-at-Home
Fidus Achates
I’ll Make My Love a Present
My True-Love
The Altitudes of Love
In Absence
The Haying
A Fire of Boughs
The Poet and the Vestures
The Minstrel Who Imagined Song
As I Lay Easy on My Bed
Underground
A Simple by the Sea
Uncollected Poems
The Tree, the Bird, and the Leaf
The Abstract Professor
The Thin Woman Upon the Road
Preface
Selecting the poems for this collection was not easy. I have no doubt that some readers who know Reece’s work well will be unhappy that a personal favorite is perhaps not included. I have tried to achieve a balance between the ballads and the lyric poems, and since the ballads tend to be longer, I have tried to present a representative sampling of Reece’s themes, and also to include those that I feel are the strongest and most successful. I have also included more poems from the first two volumes than from the last two, as I feel they are stronger collections overall. Toward the end of his life, Reece was ill, harried, and depressed, and he expended much of his precious store of energy on his novel, The Hawk and the Sun. In 1957 he wrote to his friend Pratt Dickson, "I have written nothing since the last day of 1954, when I completed the manuscript for The Hawk and the Sun. I doubt if I ever write much more poetry. I don’t feel it anymore" (qtd. in Sellers, 25).
I have organized the poems simply by presenting them as selections from each of the four books, chronologically ordered. I feel that an aesthetic progression, or evolution, can be seen.
I would like to acknowledge my considerable debt to Reece’s biographers, Raymond A. Cook and Bettie Sellers, upon whose research and writing I have depended heavily. Anyone interested in Reece and his poetry would certainly find the documentary video The Bitter Berry: The Life and Work of Byron Herbert Reece,
coproduced by Bettie Sellers, of interest. I would also like to acknowledge a personal and professional debt to Hugh Ruppersburg. My thanks I gratefully tender to Fred Chappell, James Kibler, John Lang, Betty Smith, Rebecca Smith, and Elaine Marshall.
This edition is dedicated to the memory of
EDWARD F. KRICKEL
Man of letters, Raconteur, Great soul.
Introduction
Byron Herbert Reece was born on September 14, 1917, to Juan and Emma Reece, who lived on a farm near Choestoe, in Union County, Georgia. From the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, Reece published four volumes of poems and two novels, all with E. P. Dutton, and all receiving generally favorable reviews. In a 1955 review, Edward M. Case wrote: I know of no living poet writing in the English language, or pretending to, who has written lyrics equal to the best poems in ’The Season of Flesh,’ by Byron Herbert Reece…. It seems to me that with the exception of Robert Frost, Reece is our greatest living poet, and even Frost is not so pure a lyricist, nor as strong and lonely a voice
(qtd. in Cook 113–14). His mother and father had both contracted tuberculosis by the mid-1930s, so Reece faithfully tended their mountain farm even while accepting visiting writing positions at UCLA, Emory University, and the University of Georgia. As his letters and poems attest, he was at home
on the farm, but the hard work and long hours required in running a farm often prevented him from devoting himself to his writing as he would have liked, and the isolation, while good for his writing, hindered his participation in any sort of literary life. On the other hand, his occasional forays into national literary life through readings, promotional tours, and writer-in-residence positions made him generally uncomfortable and homesick and prevented him from devoting the time necessary to maintaining a successful mountain farm. Because of his middling
success as both a writer and a farmer and the constant warring of these two, he was often conflicted and ambivalent, and his financial situation frequently required him to take on part-time or temporary teaching assignments that he found onerous. He eventually contracted the disease that had killed both his parents, and, depressed by his deteriorating health and the prospect of hospitalization and dependency, he took his own life in 1958.
Tuberculosis haunted Reece, and, coupled with his natural reticence, shaped both his life and his art. His friend and supporter Ralph McGill, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, put it this way:
All of us have within us an inexplicable loneliness. Byron had the mountain silence. He was not an outgoing man. In talks in Atlanta and the mountains he would reveal a little of his inner self, but only glimpses. The fact that he had tuberculosis made him feel himself cut off from falling in love with a girl. He knew, or believed, he could not, with honor, fall in love, marry, and have a family. So he withdrew. But what sorrow and grief this was to him, only he knew. He never shared it. (374)
McGill also says that Reece felt he should not visit the homes of his friends, especially if they had children. One of Reece’s best-known poems, I Go by Ways of Rust and Flame,
expresses his sense of loneliness and alienation:
I go by ways of rust and flame
Beneath the bent and lonely sky;
Behind me on the ways I came
I see the hedges lying bare,
But neither question nor reply.
A solitary thing am I
Upon the roads of rust and flame
That thin at sunset to the air.
I call upon no word nor name,
And neither question nor reply
But walk alone as all men must
Upon the roads of flame and rust.
In Reece’s depiction of his solitary, fatalistic traveler, I hear the accents of Frost’s Acquainted with the Night
and Desert Places.
More particularly, rust and