Light reading.(Book Review)

Catching Light: Poems by Kathryn Stripling Byer. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2002, 62 PP., $22.95 hardcover, $15.95 paper.

The opening line of Kathryn Stripling Byer's first book, The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest, had me intrigued and smiling:

 
Going down the road feeling 
  good, I snap 
my fingers. Hear, hear! at an 
  auction my father 
bid sixty-five dollars for a fat 
  Hampshire pig 
just by rubbing his nose.... 
Crabbed youth, 
crab apples, crepe myrtle, I 
  mumble 
as I shuffle downhill, my crabbed 
  youth 
behind me like gnats singing. I've 
  come a long way 
from what's been described as a 
  mean and starved 
corner of backwoods America. 
  That has a ring 
to it. (p. 3) 

I was right there on that road with her at the end:

 
... Some words 
are gates swinging wide open, and 
    I walk on through 
one more summer that like this 
    road's going 
down easy. The gnats sing, and 
    I'm going 
to sing. One of these days I'll be 
    gone. (p. 4) 

"Take that, world" the feisty young …