Barrier Island Suite: Poems

by Kendall Dunkelberg

Overview

The poems of Barrier Island Suite are inspired by the life, art, and writings of Walter Inglis Anderson, who spent much of his adult life exploring the barrier islands of Mississippi, sketching and painting their flora and fauna, and chronicling his adventures in numerous logs. The islands form a liminal space between the land and sea, between  nature and culture, between madness and conformity. Elements of the Anderson’s life, including his travels, his struggles with mental illness, and his murals at Oldfields, the Ocean Springs Public School and Community Center, and the cottage at Shearwater Pottery are also incorporated.


from "The Islander"

Painting his subject,
Wen Yü K’o becomes bamboo.
Han Kan turns to horse.
Walter merges with island,
follows pig tunnels through brush.

In flotsam shoes, he
walks on water moccasins
and on copperheads.
Not immune to their venom
he suffers fevered visions.

He’s the young heron
seen climbing a dead pine spar
with feet, wings, and bill,
stretching out to mount a cloud
and take the heavens by storm.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781680030662
Publisher:	Texas Review Press
Publication date:	04/08/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	80
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

KENDALL DUNKELBERG directs the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at Mississippi University for Women in Columbus, Mississippi, where he also directs the Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium. He has two previous collections of poetry, Landscapes and Architectures (Florida Literary Foundation Press, 2001) and Time Capsules (Texas Review Press, 2009). His poems and translations have appeared in many magazines.

Table of Contents

I Prelude

Sand Mountain 1

Mississippi Sound 2

Sea Oats 3

Settlement 5

Isle of Caprice 6

II Courante

Undulant Fever 10

Asylum Roads 11

Nullah 13

III Water Music

Dog Keys Pass 16

Chandeleur 17

North Key 18

The Magic Hour 19

Horn Island 20

Island in the Stream 21

Chivaree 22

IV Intermezzi

The Cottage 26

Ocean Springs 27

The Road to Shu 28

V The Rite of Spring

Natural Law 32

Nature morte 33

Birdfall 35

Thorns 36

Silent Spring 37

Pots of Gold 38

The Islander 39

Betsy 40

VI Claire de Lune

Great Spirit Road 44

Father of Waters 46

The Little Room 47

Annotations 49

References 60

List of Illustrations 61

Interviews

Columbus, Mississippi

Editorial Reviews

"Less known for its painters and poets than for it's novelists and musicians, Mississippi has for the last two hundred years contributed freely to the annals of eccentricity, of oddball genius and madness. To the unfortunate reader unfamiliar not merely with the work but with the character of the painter Walter Anderson, Kendall Dunkelberg's Barrier Island Suite will serve as an admirable introduction; to diehard Anderson fans (such as myself) it is an amplification of the mystery. This excellent book does a nearly impossible job: it yokes together the interiority of a very unusual artist while simultaneously observing him from the outside, giving us a portrait of 'the artist... at one with creation for an afternoon, bathed in gentle sunlight,' Perhaps never truly at home on earth, Anderson is finally granted by these poems a place where 'The four edges / of his sail blow to the four corners of his dream'."
- T.R. Hummer
author of Skandalon (LSU Press)


"In Barrier Island Suite, the Mississippi back-bays and river and creek systems with the blue crabs, channel cats, bulrushes, mangroves, egrets, and 'Mississippi /kites flashing their tails in a warm still breeze,' which inspired Anderon's watercolors and writings, scuttle adn lean and wing and whisker and stalk to life. The most impressive quality of the collection, however, is how the poems probe the landscape of Anderson's mind: his artistic sensibility and madness, his Taoist mysticism and obsession with the cycles of nature."
- Adam Vines
author of The Coal Life (university of Arkansas Press)

From the Publisher