I wrote the following review for the Clarion-Ledger. It is to appear in Sunday’s paper. We are ecstatic to host Bee Donley for her sophomore book of poetry and we hope you all come out this Saturday, March 8th, at 2 p.m.!
In time for her 90th birthday, Bee Donley’s second poetry collection, Mostly Mississippi, interweaves memoir and narrative in verse. Ms. Donley, a retired Jackson English teacher, writes with a rare, Southern grace. She is polite yet unflinchingly truthful; in short, she writes the way she lives.
Divided into two sections, Mostly Mississippi covers the broad sweep of her life, both the past and the present. In some instances, they exist simultaneously in a Mississippi “whose ghosts are watching.” Ms. Donley allows us a glimpse into the past. She mourns the changes. “The present is heartbreaking to me . . . Progress cannot obliterate the natural order or the memory of another time.”
If at first the poems seem romanticized ruminations on the past, Ms. Donley’s heartbreaking and unsentimental portrayals of aging give a sharp veracity to the collection. She writes, “Now as I walk the nursing home corridor with my walker/I must remember to lift high my legs . . . I round the judging ring and head for review.”
Jeff Allred, a former student, remembers, “Bee taught me plenty, too, but thinking back, I find myself focused on qualities not quantities. She teaches things you won’t pick up elsewhere: how to mount enough tension to swing a partner without horsing her, to rock heels in your AARP days, to ferry a conversation across while not burning popovers, to figure out how seriously to take Faulkner’s residues of romanticism. To say she’s ‘last of a breed’ (or whatever nostalgic phrase) would be true, but it would miss the way a teacher like Bee leaves a little durable something with every student and loved one as a seed for later, unpredictable growth.” Ms. Donley accomplishes on the page what she also did in the classroom. She teaches us unexpected lessons.
Bee Donley will be at Lemuria Saturday, March 8th, at 2 p.m for a signing and reading.
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