Review Essay

Bodies and Soul

Four Books by Lowcountry Poets

Jo Angela Edwins

Page 159 →Marcus Amaker, Hold What Makes You Whole (Free Verse Press, 2023), 202 pp., paperback $19.99.

Katie Ellen Bowers, This Earthly Body (Main Street Rag, 2024), 94 pp., paperback $15.00.

Miho Kinnas, Waiting for Sunset to Bury Red Camellias (Free Verse Press, 2023), 88 pp., paperback $8.00.

Yvette R. Murray, Hush, Puppy (Finishing Line Press, 2023), 46 pp., paperback $15.99.

In my last review essay for this publication, I stated that so many books had been published by South Carolina poets in and around 2023 that I could not review them all in one essay. Indeed, I cannot review them all in two, but this essay will be the next in a series that will begin to try. Of course, we hope that South Carolina poets continue to publish books at such a pace that this reviewer remains in catch-up mode for a long while. This review essay focuses on books by four poets who at some point in their lives have called the South Carolina Lowcountry home and whose works explore the intersection between the physical and spiritual selves of the speakers and characters.

Marcus Amaker, inaugural poet laureate of Charleston from 2016 to 2022, published his tenth book of poetry, Hold What Makes You Whole, in 2023 with his publishing company Free Verse Press. Like his other collections, the book showcases Amaker’s various artistic talents as a graphic designer, musician, and poet, as photographs and collages intersperse with rhythmic poems to give the book a multimodal appeal. Dedicated to his greatgreat-aunt Ruth Hubbard Robinson, a poet who passed away before she and Amaker could republish her 1996 collection IMAGES: Mirrored from the Heart, Amaker’s book features poems that reflect both the musicality of poetry (for example, “Earthquake Dance,” “The Acoustics Here”) and the power of family (for example, “Heartline/Bloodline,” “A Doctor Tells Us Page 160 →It’s Not a Life or Death Situation”). But the contents of the collection are as diverse as the poet’s mind, reflecting especially the lived history of African Americans, most especially African Americans in Charleston. One shining example, “Black Cloth,” is dedicated to the nine members of Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (also called Mother Emanuel) who were killed when Dylann Roof executed a racially motivated attack at a Bible study meeting in 2015. The poem begins with the powerful command, “Racism,/let us no longer walk in your shoes.” The evils of racism are described as “cloaking yourself in a black cloth/like the grim reaper,” but the poem moves on to concentrate on the men and women of Mother Emanuel who were killed in racism’s name. The women are described as “speak[ing] the light that flows from love,” and the men are described as “walk[ing] towards heaven with focus,/even when your shoes were stained/with the dirt of intolerance.” The poem calls out to Clementa Pinckney, South Carolina state senator and senior pastor at Mother Emanuel, referencing a black cloth “at Clementa Pinckney’s seat,/resting under a single rose.” As the poem goes on to celebrate the unity in Charleston inspired by people of various races who were appalled by the violence, it concludes with a call to remove the Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds, a call that was thankfully eventually heard by South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley:

And I would rather hang a black cloth

on a flag pole

than give the confederate flag another glimpse of the sun.

Other poems in Hold What Makes You Whole contemplate the disproportionate effect of police brutality on African Americans. “The Creepy Crawlies” is dedicated to Jamal Sutherland, a mentally ill African-American man who died in North Charleston’s Sheriff Al Cannon Detention Center in 2021. The opening stanza depicts police as “cockroaches” hiding in wait on busy highways to pull over unsuspecting African-American drivers, who find themselves afraid, fearful that “[i]nstead of you/killing the bug,/the bug kills you.” By the end of the poem, the “slick brown skin/that scares” the police becomes the cockroach they feel justified in killing. “Black Numerology” is dedicated to Walter Scott, the man whom police officer Michael Slager killed in North Charleston with a gunshot to the back in 2015. Slager initially lied about the circumstances surrounding Scott’s death, until a video appeared showing what actually happened. In the poem, Amaker’s speaker states that Page 161 →he watched the video of Scott’s death hundreds of times and counted the thirteen steps Scott took in running away from Slager until the eighth bullet killed him. The poem imagines how many steps he took before dying and how many he might have taken had he lived, before powerfully concluding:

My mouth

is tired of

sounding out the syllables

it takes to talk

about America’s

favorite pastime:

Counting bullets

and burying Brown bodies.

It should certainly be noted that many of the poems in Hold What Makes You Whole are positive in tone, poems of joy and hope and love. Some are love poems to Amaker’s wife, Jordan (“Queen,” “Making Love with Only Words”). Some are celebrations of the life of his daughter, Rei, and the poet’s wonder at daily living (“Point of View,” “Up,” “South Sensory”). Others chronicle struggles (“Another Poem about Stuttering,” “United States of Anxiety”). Amaker’s collection is multivocal, containing both the poet’s own unique voice and the imagined voices of others. In this way, it reflects both diversity and unity. As the poet declares in “Connecting the Dots,”

I want to hold people closer than the stars

hold our attention.

I want to admire them for

longer than a

firework spark.

Charleston native Yvette R. Murray published her chapbook Hush, Puppy with Finishing Line Press in 2023. A chapbook is a short collection of poems; Murray’s consists of thirty-three poems spanning thirty-six pages. Divided into “Call” and “Response” sections, the collection is a hymn to the Gullah legacies that make up a central component of the rich character of the Charleston area. This slim volume resonates with celebration, frustration, triumph, anger, joy, and reverence. Murray mixes form poems with inventive Page 162 →free verse poems and multiple speakers to reflect the variety of voices represented in Lowcountry communities, especially African-American communities. Charleston is both celebrated and seen for all its dark history, as is illustrated in the lovely piece “Port City,” in which the speaker is “[mesmerized” by the city’s mysteries:

I am lost in the swirl

of steel, blood and glass.

Phalanges folded intimately.

Your shadows leaping back into azaleas

as if you wish not to be seen because you do keep secrets from me

And those secrets are the darkness that the common romantic image of Charleston belies, “Coffin-Trees on avenues/and still winds that blow.” Nevertheless, the speaker declares himself a “simple man who desires/the complicated love you give.” Similarly, in “Spring Street Ghazal,” the poet shows the successful and the downtrodden among the crowds spotted on the busy street. The “blue suit” buying a cappuccino contrasts with the “black-hooded kid with a wood look,” as the large pecan trees contrast with the nearly hidden birds’ nests settled in the letters of a store sign. In the end, the poet alone notices all of it: “Yvette squints and comes the vision:/Seeing the whole if only you would look.”

Some poems in Hush, Puppy echo each other in intriguing ways. For example, “R. K.”—whose title stands for “Rice Kingdom” and echoes the rice trade in South Carolina that could not be sustained after the end of slavery—reflects on enslaved people’s descendants who become property owners themselves, working for the good of their children instead of the good of enslavers. The descendants’ success is symbolized by the “[s]ilverware dancing slowly/in the doors of a buffet/crammed full” with the possessions earned by a Pullman porter whose house is decorated with the “diplomas and degrees,/kin and faces,/awards and funeral programs” of a family descended from enslaved people on a rice plantation, though the descendants now live “[f]ar away from the swamp/away from the mud,” so distanced from hard farm labor that “a hoe rusts on the back porch.” The almost human character of household items and their ability to stand for a family’s history are similarly reflected in the poem “The Lazy Susan and the China Cabinet Used to Argue,” in which the speaker declares that “once a year not ever twice” these household pieces would argue about “what color Page 163 →Martin’s tie was/Or what type of shoes Medgar was wearing that day.” Even the contents of the cabinet—teacups, seafood forks, champagne flutes—would bicker. The speaker, busy cleaning the house, concludes the poem declaring, “Long after the drying was done/I could hear them talking/loud, loud, loud to make sure I would still hear.” Indeed, robust (even if ghostly) voices of ancestors resonate throughout Murray’s collection in poems with evocative titles like “Carolina Blues,” “Notes from Back Pew of Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church,” “Self Portrait as Sweetgrass,” and “Minstrel Man,” which is a finely crafted pantoum. Ultimately, the collection acknowledges the complexities of fleeing histories of racial oppression in the ancestors’ homeland only to face different kinds of racial oppression elsewhere. The final poem of the collection is “Come Back; Dis Ya’ Home,” a titular line that acts as a refrain in this poem, which is subtitled “A Bop for 2020.” The speaker quotes an elder who bemoans the fact that “[f]olk walked off plantations/into another white nightmare” and found themselves “away from rhythms, away from rhythms/that breathe underwater.” The elder urges those who left to “[l]et blood memory guide you/back to Purple mindscape” where they might “[d]rink sassafras/strong horse tea,/be a midwife or potter, sew sweetgrass/and build strong mountains again.” The land soaked in the ancestors’ blood is also the land that nurtures their descendants in Murray’s multifaceted portrayal of the South Carolina Lowcountry.

Another Charleston native, Katie Ellen Bowers now calls Heath Springs, SC, in Lancaster County home. The landscapes of both are reflected in some of the poems in her collection This Earthly Body. Readers might consider, for example, “A Holy City,” in which the poet responds to those who ask why a Charleston native would leave the celebrated city to make a South Carolina small town her home. But, as the volume title suggests, it is the phenomenological landscape of the poet’s life within her own body that becomes the central subject of most of the poems in the book. The struggles of being a woman in America, with all its gendered demands and prejudices, radiate through many of these poems, which explore mother–daughter and male-female dynamics with the brave frankness that harkens back to the Confessional poetry of the 1950s and 1960s. The speaker of Bowers’s poems frequently calls out the shame visited on girls in their youth who are simultaneously sexualized by their culture and blamed for the sexuality projected upon them when their bodies begin to mature—and sometimes before they mature—as in the sadly disturbing “Rubbing Sand.” In “Etymology,” Bowers considers the origins of the word love, which comes from early terms for desire, and declares

Page 164 →I never could quite grasp why wanting a boy,

the one you think you love,

to slip his fingers between your thighs was invasive

see also: encroaching

see also: crude

see also: slutty

At the end of the short poem, the speaker is unashamed to be searching “for understanding/in the map of constellations/freckled onto my lover’s back.” Erotic poems are peppered throughout the collection, acknowledging the woman’s joy in her sexuality, despite a culture that casts aspersions on it, as is illustrated in “What to Make of That,” in which the speaker’s male Christian friend, who was “once not a Christian,” tells her that he “cannot feel the presence of Christ” around her, even though he still concludes that, despite that absence, “anyone would be a fool not to love” her. Poems like “before my new last love(r),” “The Heat of Summer,” and “A Promise” show both the tender and the tentative edges of intimate relationships. In many of these poems, the speaker is struggling to love and respect herself, given the mixed messages about morality, female body image, and male expectations that shape her environment.

An additional important subject in This Earthly Body is the mother–daughter relationship: both the speaker’s relationship with her mother and the speaker’s wonder at becoming a mother herself. In the long, multipart poem “A History of Things Some Remembered and Some Not,” the speaker portrays a fraught relationship with a mother who struggles with posttraumatic stress disorder, alcoholism, grief, and mental illness. She recalls a childhood when the mother, wracked with grief for her own dying mother and father, refuses to be a supportive parent to her own child, whose father is working hundreds of miles away. The mother’s failures become a lesson to the speaker, who sees her mother soften toward the speaker’s daughter in a way she never could toward her own. The final section of the poem, in a tone of prosaic resignation, declares, “Anyway, this is fine./We learn from the failures of our parents.” By contrast, the last section of the book contains several poems in which the speaker expresses her love for and surprise at her relationship with her own growing daughter. In “Things I’ve Learned While Taking a Bath with My Daughter,” the daughter washes her mother clean and then wants to lie back on her in a posture that reminds the mother of carrying her as a baby, “My body her home again.” In “Take That, Fire Page 165 →Ants,” the speaker notices, in the person of her child, the contradictions in human sympathy, as the child leaves cracker crumbs to feed the black ants near the porch but gleefully rides her bike through a fire ant hill, reveling in killing them. Powerfully, the poem concludes, “We seek to provide, but we long to destroy.” The same principle might apply to the complicated relationships between humans who should love each other. Indeed, the complexities of love are at the heart of the struggles expressed in Bowers’s book, and the same might be said of the final collection under review in this essay.

Hilton Head resident Miho Kinnas draws on her Japanese heritage in her vividly imagistic collection Waiting for Sunset to Bury Red Camellias, also published by Amaker’s Free Verse Press. The connection between the physical image and its spiritual resonance is especially strong in this volume, as several poems depend on a sensory experience, often of the natural world, described in such a way that illuminates the situation of the soul. This illumination is perhaps most apparent in her gathering of haiku and tanka a third of the way through the book. These small poems create tones from the humorous to the contemplative, to the sad, through their brief depictions of vivid scenes and actions. Any pet owner is likely to identify, for example, with this scene: “burnt bacon/for a few seconds/the dog forgets me.” Sudden waves of grief are demonstrated concretely with “I am fine/until crisp iceberg lettuce/brings out my tears.” Several individual short poems throughout the collection have similar sharply imagistic effects. “Earthquake” describes the seismic phenomenon as “shaking only the air/not the house with the door that/needs a little lift to lock or unlock.” “Weather Forecast” describes the opening of hibiscus blossoms into the afternoon: “those petals will grow/too large and are/expected to disrupt the sunset.” “Reading Henri Cole” has the speaker distracted from poetry by noticing a blue heron watching an osprey circling in the sky. As is evident, the natural landscape of the Lowcountry is almost palpable in Kinnas’s collection, but the domestic sphere also plays a large role in the book. “Spirit” shows a widow reconnecting with her late husband by digging through a freezer “[t]o find/the lemon cake her husband loved.” One of the most delightful poems in the collection, “Happiness Pancake,” describes two people working together to make a pancake that represents their joyfulness in their togetherness. The poem also acts as a kind of recipe for the simple breakfast comfort food, down to the “little secret” at the end: With lid close at hand, “add a bit of water./Let the pancake steam/just a little while longer.” Cooking the pancake becomes an emblem of the precise makings of a strong and loving relationship.

Page 166 →Indeed, as blurb writer Grace Cavalieri says on the book’s back cover, “the book’s subject is love,” which, she notes, is “a theme that is perfect to make beauty permanent”; that love, romantic and platonic, ties body and soul together in Kinnas’s poems. “The Last Swim,” dedicated to Maggie Schein, unites pleasant memories of a winter hike in distant years with a more recent swim at the coast and uses the poetical description of both memories to act as a kind of love note to the speaker’s friend. Several poems also touch on the complexities of familial love, especially the fraught devotions that emerge between an aging mother and an adult daughter. “The Pitch” features the speaker’s mother telling her daughter of dreams set in the mother’s native Manchuria, in which she and her friends “sold cigarettes to passersby” by shouting sales pitches in both Chinese and Russian. The mother interrupts her dream recollections to say ominously, “I may die soon/If you leave now I won’t see you again.” The speaker doesn’t believe her, but the poem implies that the mother was right, as it concludes with the speaker saying, “I still hear her voice repeating the pitch/with a chuckle in between.” The apparent accuracy of the mother’s dark prediction is further supported by the placement of “The Pitch” immediately after “Yokohama,” in which the speaker notices her mother’s physical decline illustrated by her need to rest on walks and her dependence on a cane. As the poem approaches its end, the speaker explains, “The day I saw my mother for the last time/she staggered out of the house without a cane./I am fine, I am fine, don’t worry, I’m fine.”

It should be noted that this book demonstrates well Kinnas’s skill with using white space and line breaks to create poems that use the page to help construct meaning. In “Three Shrimp Boats on the Horizon” individual words are mapped in a grid of three words by three lines, making three nine-word stanzas, to build both evocative concrete imagery and a kind of concrete poem reminiscent of boats spaced along the ocean’s horizon. “A Breath in the Wind” is a two-column mirror poem (or, perhaps, more precisely, two mirror poems) that may be read forward and backward with words consciously placed in reflective positions. The first poem in the collection, “The Sea Foam Arrives to Hide the Lies of a Woman Poet,” is divided into eight sections stretching across eight pages. It contains physical placements of stanzas and words in ways that suggest images of staircases or stepping stones, or forms that suggest but do not quite match the structure of the haibun. Kinnas is clearly concerned with craft, and, in several cases, the appearance of the poems on the page invite as much contemplation as the words themselves.

Page 167 →Each of these poetry collections in one way or another contemplates the mysterious intersections between the physical and the spiritual and, likewise, encourages readers to question their assumptions about complex subjects such as love, death, history, and cultural imperatives. Although the poetic voices are diverse, the landscape that nurtures those voices is, in each case, the complicated echo of the lushness of South Carolina’s Lowcountry. South Carolina has a long tradition of storytelling, song singing, and poem making. These four collections carry that tradition forward, as living readers and writers make new South Carolina history, looking with characteristically mixed emotions toward the second quarter of the twenty-first century.

Jo Angela Edwins is professor of English and Trustees’ Research Scholar at Francis Marion University. A widely published poet, she currently serves as the poet laureate of the Pee Dee. Her recent collection, A Dangerous Heaven, was published in 2023. She is the 2025 recipient of the J. Loren Mason Distinguished Professor Award.