Saturday Review: “A Triumph From Doodle Hill” a review by Rebecca Godwin of Collected Poems of Marty Silverthorne, Malaika King Albrecht and Marsha White Warren, Editors.
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“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.” Godwin writes. The collection is made up of work from Greatest Hits, We Had Good Names, and The Widower’s Tongue and includes an introduction by former NC Poet Laureate Shelby Stephenson.
Godwin states, “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.”
“Hwy 125 North of Doodle Hill & Hwy 33 East of Chocowinity,” 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 cotton,” 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 passed away in 2019, but lives on “in the poems that bring eastern North Carolina and the people that he loved to the world.”
Read the rest of the review in the Winter 23 Online issue out now and buy the book from RA Fountain.