Black shawl : poems

ISBN: 0807122513

Author: Byer, Kathryn Stripling

Condition: New

Black Shawl emanates from Kathryn Stripling Byers fascination with female ballad singers in southern Appalachia, whose voices haunt the mountains still, and from the image of a black net or shawl being dragged over the ground, plumbing the depths, collecting bits and fragments of a womans life. The singers and storytellers of this splendid collection are struggling to answer the query of the books epigraph: What will you make of this?The first section, Voices, offers a variety of female perspectives-those of mothers, daughters, sisters, lovers. These women are singing the old songs and waiting for their lives to change. Blood Mountain, the second part, experiments with ballad conventions and the mysteries of mythmaking: . . . one storys good as another so long as theres blood in it. Delphia, a quilter and teacher who narrates the third section of Black Shawl, epitomizes these mountain women-the very ones who became the Keepers of the Ballads, the repositories, and who passed down their knowledge.Through the remarkable mountain women of Black Shawl, Byer portrays the singers, once mute, finding their place, weaving a thread in the web of their existence and its endlessly evolving pattern.