A TRIUMPH FROM DOODLE HILL

a review by Rebecca Godwin

Collected Poems of Marty Silverthorne is the tenth compilation of poetry from a man whose writing supported his own healing as it showed the world a quadriplegic person’s capabilities. Published two years after the poet’s death at age sixtytwo, this volume showcases poems selected from chapbooks as well as uncollected poems composed in grief after his wife’s death in 2018. Writing himself as well as his family into poems, Silverthorne describes a rural eastern North Carolina culture that former state poet laureate Shelby Stephenson taught him to claim. In a candid voice, these poems counter poverty, hard drinking, suffering and loss with the redemptive powers of memory and love.

Granddaddy wasn’t drunk,” yet this woman marries and divorces three men, “each one a drunk just like her daddy.” Section V of “Testimonial of Jars” features

Tight-jawed men . . . careless with their words, too drunk to drag themselves home to wives who kept supper warm on a Wilson wood stove.

In considering the hard lives made harder by liquor’s draw, the speaker especially honors the women who held families together, including Grandma in “Second Serving,” a woman who “cooked in the face of fear / serving supper to soothe sorrow / or warm up celebration” as part of her “recipe for forgiveness,” nourishing not just bodies but souls.

REBECCA GODWIN recently retired as the Elizabeth H. Jordan Chair of Southern Literature at Barton College. She has published essays on Lee Smith, Fred Chappell, and Thomas Wolfe among other writers in journals such as Mississippi Quarterly , Pembroke Magazine , and Southern Quarterly and a monograph, Community Across Time: Robert Morgan’s Words for Home (West Virginia University Press, 2023). Read her interviews with Morgan in NCLR 2014 and NCLR Online 2017

MARTY SILVERTHORNE (1957–2019) received a graduate degree from East Carolina University in 1988 and an undergraduate degree from St. Andrews. His awards include the Bunn-McClelland Chapbook Award, the Sam Ragan Fine Arts Award, the Persephone Press Award, a James Applewhite Poetry Prize Honorable Mention in 2014 and 2015, and the North Carolina Poetry Society Poet Laureate Award in 2015, as well as regional art grants from the North Carolina Arts Council.

Silverthorne’s evocations of the agricultural landscape he knew as a child mark a starting point for his and the reader’s reflections on the effects of place and human decisions. Tenant shacks, mules, tobacco, washhouses, clothes lines, outhouses, and hog pens dot the Doodle Bug Hill, or Doodle Hill, community where he grew up near Williamston in Martin County. In this country setting where motorcycles and alcohol provide a sense of control to men on the lower end of the economic scale, Silverthorne’s male family members drink too much, a reality the poet describes with a hint of sadness. In “Janie Christmas” we learn that Aunt Janie’s “favorite Christmas was the one when /

Silverthorne includes many positives in these poems of memory, music foremost among them. Early radio and television country music stars found their way into family names, signifying the influence of the airwaves on Americans in the 1950s and beyond. “How We Got Our Names” ties his family tree to country stars: Marty Robbins, Loretta Lynn, Gene Autry, Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Kitty Wells, Lester Flatt, and Earl Scruggs, to name a few.* Fond memories of his daddy “yodel[ing] blue collar blues” to friends’ fiddle and banjo playing in “Shagnasty” join a steel guitar calling his parents from the grave, at least in Silverthorne’s imagination, in “Gettin’ the Holy Ghost at R.A. Fountain.” Beginning with one of my favorite Silverthorne lines, “Daddy’s dead but not tonight,” the latter poem captures music’s power. Hearing music at the R.A. Fountain General Store triggers Silverthorne’s memories of his parents’ love of country and gospel music, connecting him to his parents’ bond in the imagined scene where Daddy dances and Mama testifies. Tellingly, the speaker observing this gaiety interjects, “If Mama’s heart had windows, / you’d see a house of broken panes.” Happy times seem tempered by a poignant knowledge of the whole of life, where suffering is not erased but sometimes alleviated, by love or by the beauty of art.

Arranging words to make poetry helped Silverthorne to make order of the chaos resulting from his youthful decision to drive a motorcycle while “[s]toned on star-white phenobarbs,” as he says in “Hungover Sun.” Crafting lines about family, he acknowledges the pain he caused. And by putting his physical limitations on the page, he lessens their power and gains intellectual control. The last stanza of “Walking Toward Jesus” illustrates this conversion:

Jesus, my feet ain’t fit to serve you; thirty years paralyzed, numb as a stone, feet scarred by the surgical saw, two toes gone home to meet you, eight drawn into questions.

The fine imagery and rhythm here illustrate Silverthorne’s well-honed craft, and the important last word makes readers stop to ponder the “questions” the poet must have. He draws readers into his physical confinement as well as into his intellectual and emotional space, leaving us to wonder why suffering seems necessary in this world and whether the poet is journeying in his faith or saying he is not fit to do so.

The question of faith, in fact, echoes throughout the collection. In “Pure Baptist,” Granddaddy deems preachers who show up to eat when death or tragedy strikes to be “vermin,” a judgment the poem does not condemn. In another poem, when witnessing Cousin Phil Pea’s baptism in the Roanoke River, the poet wonders if Phil thinks of Granddaddy’s seining herring to feed the family or sees “the sunken pickup with three black boys / lashed together with anchor rope, / eyes huge hollow sockets, mouths sealed with duct tape” when he bobs up from his dunking. The people and horrors of this world concern the poet. In “Graveside Silence,” the poet notes at his brother’s funeral that the preacher who “flaunts his [brother’s] sins like a bedsheet flapping / on the clothesline” does not mention, when he “brags / on how he has saved the whole family,” that Silverthorne “failed to raise [his] hand to summon him and the Lord.” The beautiful poem “Barrel of Prayer,” whose line “Grandmother, if I could bend / myself into your beliefs” encapsulates the dichotomy of their spiritual views, connects to poems clarifying that Silverthorne sees divinity in human love and the natural world more than in his grandmother’s traditional God. “Rainbow Ink” paints evidence:

God took blackboard chalk and colored some clouds, high above the Pamlico River then licked his long index finger, etched MS + SB 4-ever, a reference to his beloved wife Sylvia Bullock, who taught him to call plants by their names. Poems honoring his caregivers, such as “Bed Rest Blues,” a lovely villanelle without the form’s strict rhyme scheme, and “Black Angel” also highlight his sense that the care and humanity people extend represent the truly divine.

The last section, titled “The Widower’s Tongue,” brings these themes together in twenty-one poems speaking directly and painfully of the deep grief that consumes Silverthorne after Sylvia’s death. “Maybe the lightning bug is you,” he says to her, “come back to be with me.” The blue-gray herons, “winged gods of prayer / and meditation,” look for “the goodness that comes up / from the Earth’s soul.” Cardinals, hummingbirds, Shackleford Bank wild horses, crying crepe myrtles, and especially the butterfly that is Sylvia waiting for Silverthorne to join her in their eternal butterfly dance turn the aching forlornness, the “grief settle[d] in the bones” that Sil- verthorne so powerfully portrays, into a resurrection.

Following the Sylvia poems, “Hwy 125 North of Doodle Hill & Hwy 33 East of Chocowinity,” reprinted from his 2015 collection Holy Ghosts of Whiskey, shares Silverthorne’s directions to his survivors: “Bury me here / at the end of the stubbled rows / beyond the golden soybeans / and fields blanketed with cot-

Early in November, 2022, sad news began to spread within North Carolina’s literary community. As described by a post from the North Carolina Writers’ Network,

The news of Philip Gerard’s death was the kind of shock that tempts you to think it can’t possibly be true. His vitality was of a kind that seemed irreducible and essential. Philip was indeed essential to North Carolina’s literary community, playing so many fundamental roles for so long that it became hard to remember he hadn’t always been here.

The Network’s posting reminded us that this North Carolina literary icon was “[b]orn and educated in Delaware.” He “came to the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and founded the MFA in Creative Writing program there. His novel Cape Fear Rising was one of the first attempts to reveal the truth of the 1898 Wilmington coup, for which he faced considerable backlash in his adopted state and city.”1

“Write what you really want to find out about,” is one of innumerable writing tips often shared by the much-mourned professor.2 He certainly followed that advice when he began writing Cape Fear Rising , inspired by learning that the North Carolina town he had just moved to was the site of the only successful coup d’etat in US history. As he said on the occasion of receiving the North Carolina Award for Literature, “I believe in the writer as a witness to evil, as a reporter of injustice, as a chronicler of human compassion . . . as one whose skills illuminate the Truth with a capital T.”3 Illuminating that dark chapter of his new hometown did not make him popular there, but he would not be intimidated by those who would have liked to silence him, maybe even get him out of Wilmington, and he continued to write toward democratic ideals. Read his op-ed essay on removing Confederate monuments from government property as just one fine example.4 ton,” the poem begins. And after eight more stanzas extolling the specific crops and plants growing in the Down East “obsidian soil,” the last stanza announces his hope for an afterlife: “Let me live in the leaning / frame of the log barn. / Do not carry me to the well-groomed graveyard. / Bring me here, where fire scalds the earth.”

Silverthorne lives in the poems that bring eastern North Carolina and the people that he loved to the world. Going beyond his own personal story that he conveys so poignantly, he delves into memory to portray the everyday lives of working-class folks, such as the many ways they used Mason and Kerr jars – and also the racism they condoned, as in

For the reader new to these pages, perhaps new to North Carolina, we share here an introduction to this prolific writer and pillar of the North Carolina community, given by Mark Cox, Chair of the Creative Writing Department at UNC Wilmington, at a reading a few weeks before his colleague’s untimely death:

As author, Philip published sixteen books of fiction and creative nonfiction, two of which are seminal textbooks used in universities across the nation. He published more than two hundred stories and essays in distinguished venues, amassing a highly respected body of work that only a very driven and committed writer could manage. But it is never just about the numbers. Philip’s work always took on ambitious topics – war, politics, racial injustice, history – contributing substantially to our literature both nationally and in North Carolina. Indeed, in 2019, he was honored with the North Carolina Award for Literature, which is the highest civilian honor conferred by the state. But what may be most amazing is that he accomplished all this while serving dutifully as teacher, mentor, and administrator here at UNCW for thirty-three years.

Philip arrived at UNCW in 1989 and quickly turned a fledgling professional and creative writing curriculum into a well-organized, well administered and very popular concentration within the English major. As the track grew and other creative writing faculty were hired, he subsequently was the chief force behind the planning, establishment, and coordination of our MFA program in 1996. In 1999, he was instrumental in the establishment of creative

“A Lesson in Color,” a poem nodding to his dear friend and current North Carolina Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green, whose tribute to Silverthorne is included in this book. Editors Malaika King Albrecht and Marsha White Warren deserve our thanks for reminding us of this intelligent and compassionate man’s crucial contributions to the world of poetry. n writing as an independent department and in the 2000s served for seven years as department chair. It is no exaggeration to say that Philip was at the core of creative writing’s evolution here from the very beginning and he continued to serve as a voice for progress in the present. His institutional memory was invaluable. His professional instincts were impeccable. And his understanding of academic politics and policy was vast. In truth, no one has contributed more to our department than he did, and we would not be here if not for his efforts.5

It is nice to know that Philip heard his colleague’s expression of appreciation for all he did for their program. On November 8, David Gessner posted on Facebook, “How strange it will be to head into work today, to the department that he built and sustained, and find that Philip Gerard is gone.”

Philip Gerard’s passing is mourned by his beloved wife, Jill Gerard, and their family; his colleagues and students at UNCW; and numerous colleagues and former students across the state and beyond.

“We’ve all lost a champion,” wrote his UNCW colleague and friend Nina DeGramont. And Gessner called his late colleague “a steady friend who always had my back, a great and inspiring teacher, a generous supporter of our young faculty members, a prolific writer who, as a student just emailed me, ‘literally wrote the book on creative nonfiction.’”6

We encourage you to express your appreciation for this beloved professor with a contribution to the Philip Gerard Graduate Fellowship fund at UNCW. n