Out of the South - Poems (Hardcover)

Rooted in the red clay of middle Tennessee and in the lives of working-class people who exalt their southern heritage, the poems in Out of the South look unflinchingly at the life of a poor white boy instilled with a ferocious pride and taught to be a racist. These lyric poems form a coherent narrative that begins in the segregated 1950s and follows its narrator forward into his own separated life. Self-exiled from the place of his birth for nearly a quarter-century, Bowers recalls the blotched history of the region and personal moments that implicate him in a past he wishes to disown. Out of the South is both a penance for decades of silence and an affirmation of an unshakable identity. I claim, then, as my legacy the honeysuckle smelled by my mother when she was a girl in the rundown row of houses by the river where her older brother drowned. The ruins of her childhood I excavate - the old roadbed and the filled-in foundations - the vacated past, an emptiness where the lost voice is deadened by dirt and toppled walls. I conjure her already two years fatherless, a girl of eight, barefoot and wise in the ways of survival, her own mother gone wild in young widowhood, gone off for months with no promise of return...- from "Out of the South"