Low Country, High Water: Poems

by Sally Stewart Mohney

Overview

The TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series: North Carolina

Inhabiting myriad landscapes, including the marshes, rivers, and sounds of the North Carolina foothills, as well as gulfs, floodplains, and the overflowing banks of the Chattahoochee, Sally Stewart Mohney’s Low Country, High Water consists of delicate, often minimal explorations of family, mortality, nature, and the world behind perception. Often dreamlike and painterly, these poems brim with a lyrical and imagistic power, a contemplative force that ignites the imagination. With a Dickinsonian penchant for portraying states of mind through telescoped metaphors, Mohney crafts poetry that proves insightful, compassionate, and subtle. Even as this work conveys the transitory nature of our world and the people and places that construct our lives, this poetry glows with mystery, vitality, and timelessness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781680030686
Publisher:	Texas Review Press
Publication date:	07/14/2020
Series:	The TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	72
File size:	624 KB

About the Author

SALLY STEWART MOHNEY, a North Carolina native currently living in Atlanta, is the author of pale blue mercy, as part of Main Street Rag Publishing ‘Author’s Choice Series,’ and A Piece of Calm, from Finishing Line Press. Her work has been featured in journals such as the Boston Literary Review, Broad River Review, San Pedro River Review, and Town Creek Poetry.

Read an Excerpt

Communion

Salvation can finally come
as simply as lighting heat
in an early kitchen.                                 

You enter, chilly in slippers,
start several small fires           
to find your way.

Coffee, chimney,
bacon, then toast.            

Setting out white cups
bowls, plates—a creamer
pewter spoons.

Light pours in, as

pale blue mercy

Table of Contents

I Low Country, High Water

Night Migration 1

Give Your Worry 2

Low Country High Water 3

Breach Inlet 4

River Speak 5

Water, Rising 6

Dry Now 7

Surrender 8

After the Spill 9

Haunting 10

Shell 11

Winter, Bird Key 12

Considering Winter 15

Laying Down Provisions for Winter 16

January Triptych 17

Ice, Storm 18

White by the Weir 19

Kingstree, 1781 20

North of Waxhaw 21

McDowell County Understory 22

Vein Mountain 23

Ascension Coast 25

Sleeping with the Window Open 26

II Unsettled Weather

Migratory Seeds 27

Vestiges 28

Thresh/hold 29

Garden, Bed 30

Wanting 31

Once the Last Child 32

Mother's Day 33

Lily, Upturned 35

Last Window 36

She Had Always Been Your Floor 37

From Somewhere 38

The Color of Shadow 39

Aftermath 40

Your Mother's Kitchen 41

It Was So Good to See Her 42

Pawleys Island Sound 43

Uncharted 44

Collecting the Sky 45

Gulf Overlook 46

Leap Second 47

Delivery 48

III Still, Life

Aperture 51

(As to) What Remains 53

Pilot, Lost 55

Sunset, St. Sulpice 56

Still, Life 57

A Piece of Calm 59

Communion 60

Interviews

Atlanta, Georgia

Editorial Reviews

Salley Stewart Mohney is a keen observer of estuary and ocean, landscape and flower, birds and weather. She translates her landscapes, waterscapes, and interiors (‘Her Mother’s Kitchen’ being one of the gems) into connections with family, loss, and beauty, creating small, delicate patterns that intrigue and charm. A child’s going away, a father’s jigsaw sky, a mother’s loss to Parkinson’s, and the wide world in which all things live—here is the physical and the spiritual at once, touchable and fine.”
—Betty Adcock
 

“Sally Stewart Mohney takes us into a world of remarkable beauty and threatening terrain. Her weather is indeed unsettled whether the locale is coastal Carolina storms—detritus flies past: / hair, wind, sock / bits of tainted bitten heart—to the river Seine where she scatters ashes from a Paris footbridge. Mohney’s water, marshes to ocean, carry us to the natural world and all its inhabitants in lyrical and scenic ways. Family stories flow and ebb as does Mohney’s own deeply felt and beautifully told story. Digging in her garden, she finds her son’s old toys—my shoulders folded like napkins, / knees baptized. Her delicate lines fall like snow in winter, the silence in just the right spaces, the subtle, soft build of each poem until we are swept along, so completely, we forget ourselves, the magical place where every reader hopes to dwell.”
—Diana Pickney
 

From the Publisher