Before the Light Changes
poems by
Irene Blair HoneycuttISBN 13: 978-1-59948-120-3
~80 pages, $14Projected release date: September 15, 2008
***Advance discount purchase price of $9 will be available until August 25, 2008.***
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Irene Blair Honeycutt has published two other books of poetry: It Comes as a Dark Surprise (1992) and Waiting for the Trout to Speak (2002). Her first children's book, The Prince with the Golden Hair, was published in 2006.
She taught creative writing at Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte, NC, where she was awarded Teacher of the Year for Teaching Excellence. She founded and subsequently directed the college's Annual Spring Literary Festival for 14 years. Upon her retirement in 2006, the college established the Irene Blair Honeycutt Distinguished Lectureship. In 1998 Creative Loafing Magazine acknowledged her with the Best of Charlotte Award for Best Contribution to the Improvement of the Literary Climate in Charlotte. In 1997 the Charlotte Writers Club named her the first recipient of the Adelia Kimball Founders Award for her advocacy for writers.
She has taught at Queens University and the Haden Institute, offering courses in journal writing, memoir, poetry and classic fairytales. She leads workshops around the region, and each fall holds a weekend writing workshop at the Gates Studio in Burnsville, NC.
Her poems have won awards, appeared in numerous anthologies and in national journals, including Nimrod, Asheville Poetry Review, Cold Mountain Review, Southern Poetry Review, Pembroke Magazine, Devil's Millhopper, Croton Review, Crucible, The Arts Journal, and St. Andrews Review.
She earned her M.A. degree in English from East Tennessee State University. She received a NC Arts Council Scholarship to study at the Prague Summer Writers Workshop in the Czech Republic and, in 2000, was awarded a Creative Fellowship from the Charlotte Arts and Science Council. In 2004 she participated in the 5th Annual Writer's Conference in Hofsos, Iceland.
Irene Honeycutt defies the easy stereotype of Poet, disengaged from everyday life. Even better, she defies it with a vengeance—an energy that enlivens her work throughout. Whether lying in bed wondering if she should answer the doorbell, staring at an empty computer file, or watching an old man sweep water from his flooded home’s floor after hurricane Katrina, she refuses to let go of the everyday moment, whether interior or exterior, probing the depths of it for its past and ever-present reality. Because she enters her poems so completely, her readers recognize these moments as their own. When Honeycutt declares, ‘Dreams live in buried codes. /Last night they told me: /You carry a corpse around /and you are part of the sun,’ we know what she means. Before the Light Changes renders that interplay of light and shadow in all its shades of mystery.”
—Kathryn Stripling Byer,
North Carolina Poet Laureate,
author of Coming to Rest
Honeycutt slices an apple and its heart opens, particularly in those poems in memory of her dead brother. And for all the other absences we tend—and bear, the way darkness holds the moon in place/even when it’s hidden. This collection finds her swimming in a dream of a sunken pool we never had. But there are moments, also, of poignant humor. When a jazz-man asks a friend with dementia how she's doing, the reply is: Who could ask for anything more? Indeed.
—Julie Suk, The Dark Takes Aim
In "Clearing a Path for Retirement," just one of many of the memorable poems in this collection, Irene Honeycutt tells us of her refusal to send "parts of my life to the shredder." How fortunate we are that she hasn't but instead used her past to create poems that touch the reader's heart as she probes the machinations of her own. Before the Light Changes is further proof that Irene Honeycutt is one of North Carolina's finest poets.
—Ron Rash, Saints at the River
Katrina
Last night I watched a man
sweeping toxic water
between the boards of the floor
in his home--a home barely bigger
than the palm hut I built in the woods
behind my house. Held together
by the spine of his palm broom,
he swept methodically like a monk
raking the path of a Zen garden,
ignoring cameras.Evacuees awaiting Bush's arrival
by helicopter shouted, "We are not refugees.
We are Americans. We have homes."
But they don't. But they don't know that.But millions around the world know them
and what has happened--that their homes
have been hijacked, some reduced
to piled-up rubbish,pushed aside like the old woman
in the Superdome,
dead in her wheelchair,
her body covered with a blanket,
abandoned there for days.From the shelter of our homes,
we watched the humble bundle
slumped and alone in a dome-
turned-morgue.Watched while evacuees prayed
for troops to land carriers,
lift the ill from squalor,
take them to higher ground.
Snake Etching
Walking the dog
again at dusknothing new until
the snake begins its crawlto my side of the road
I tighten the leash
hug the curb surprisedwhen the pickup truck
rounds the corner picksup speed and swerves
not to avoid but to run overthe long sleek body
I avert my eyes
not wanting to believelook back and witness
a silhouette of spasms against backdrop
of red tail lights evening grass and asphaltthe snake live enough to curl and in all its pain
heave its head hold it theredo what it best does when it must
bare fangs flash tonguehiss
at a mystery unfathomable
The Radio With the Green Eye
The radio with the green eye is playing
"I'm so lonesome I could cry."
Dad turns the knob, and Gabriel Heater's voice
blasts into the living room. Dad folds
the Labor Union News and hunches
towards the radio's mouth.
It is covered with brown cloth.
I poke it when no one's around,
wondering what goes on inside.
Tonight the mouth thunders with bombs.
I get up from the sofa.
My fear is like the egg I drop
on the kitchen floor.
Mama just keeps washing dishes,
pretends not to notice.
Ronnie's in bed, wants me to play checkers.
Yesterday, he stepped on the iron rake,
sat crying in the garage while Dad poured
kerosene over the hole in his foot.
His blood soaked the towel.
I've learned that if I turn a dial in my head,
it all goes away. Even the static
of machine guns becomes a blanket
of snow, covering the war.