A Necklace of Bees, by Dannye Romine Powell

University of Arkansas Press
5 1/2 x 8 1/2, 100 pages
$16.00 paper
ISBN 978-1-55728-879-0 | 1-55728-879-8

Before the standard Press Biography of Dannye, let me add that she has been one of the guiding lights of Southern Literature for many years. That she is also a writer of stunning poems makes her well-nigh indispensble. She has enriched my life with her energy, her humor, and her flair. I might also say that I envy her shawls! Every poet should have a Dannye shawl, even the guys! KSB

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Dannye Romine Powell is the author of two books of poetry, At Every Wedding Someone Stays Home and The Ecstasy of Regret, both published by the University of Arkansas Press, and Parting the Curtains: Interviews with Southern Writers. The Ecstasy of Regret won the Brockman-Campbell Award and the Oscar Arnold Young Award and was a finalist for the Southeastern Booksellers Association Poetry Award. Powell writes on life in Charlotte and the Carolinas for the local section of the Charlotte Observer. She was the newspaper's book review editor for nearly twenty years.




When He Told Her

and she knew from the beginning
he must
one day tell her,
she thought of that banyan tree -- he would remember
the one -- and how over the long years
it had fastened itself to the earth and the earth beneath
the earth, its long roots once suspended
in air now anchoring an orphanage of limbs, the leaves
beneath the leaves marshaling the dark, as if to say, Come,
I will hold you, you and your tears, so dense
was its shade, so bold the branches, so ferociously attached.



You Can’t Write Off the Dead

A friend wrote me off once, as did a cousin,
and I was as good as dead to them
but infinitely better
because I kept my distance.
The dead don’t.
They’re invasive, like those scilla I’m still digging out
of my garden, wheeling the clumps
across the street onto city property, where they’ll bloom
their blue heads off long after I‘m gone.
The dead won’t go
across the street. They hate city property.
True, you no longer have to trim their thick toenails
or yank the
stiff hair that grows straight out
of the chin. But you remember
how you lofted the tweezers to the brazen light,
triumphant,
while the stunned air radiated pain.



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