A Review Beyond The Stone: Poems of Praise and Remembrance (Green Altar Books, 2025) by James Everett Kibler
It wouldn’t be difficult to ridicule the poetry gathered in this volume—that is, if one had no sympathy for traditionalist, formal poetics, especially poetry embedded in Southern tradition and sensibility. A hostile critic might suggest that Jim Kibler dwells in world suffused with neo-Confederate, or perhaps neo-Agrarian, twilight. And there would be at least a grain of truth in such a claim, but in this case that grain frequently produces pearls of great price. For that reason I have no intention of dwelling at any length on Kibler’s poetic weaknesses, which are primarily stylistic. Too often in his verse we detect an obvious straining after a “poetic” language which is sometimes reminiscent of the kind of thing that used to be common enough in late 19th century literary journals. And like the poets of that era, Kibler is also occasionally prone to a certain wistful sentimentality, though he seems to be aware of this tendency and makes attempts to combat it.
Minor reservations aside, Beyond the Stone is a memorable volume. It is divided into four sections, the first of which features poems dating back to the 1970s and 80s. These selections are of mixed quality, though nearly all of them contain striking passages, and one or two feature Kibler’s talent for unexpectedly comic departures. For example, in “Meditation on Sassetta’s Magi in a Time of War,” he reflects on one of the Italian painter’s best known works—a fragment of a 15th century altarpiece—in which the Magi and their entourage pass through a medieval scene that includes a “Crusader castle fortress gate” (hence the title’s “time of war”). The painting is richly detailed, but, as Kibler notes,
What stops the eye
Is proudest show of gift,
Not gold or frankincense or myrrh
But on its donkey back,
Splendid laid on a carpet richly arabesque,
Like Cleopatra on her barge reclined,
A wizened monkey with a tail of wire—
So strange, exotic, stretched out there
As if in setting rare
A rarer jewel still,
Fit gift for newborn king indeed!
“Cleopatra on her barge reclined” is a splendid touch, and Kibler was wise to compose this poem in mostly unrhymed verse, which enhances the comic tone. In the third part of the same poem, the poet wonders how Joseph and Mary would have reacted to such a gift. Of course, they would have been perfectly gracious to the Magi, but when the three kings departed? “What are we going to do with this monkey” Joseph must have asked perplexed / And Mary sadly may have said / “Diapers would have been a timely gift ….” Some readers might raise an eyebrow at this almost irreverent treatment of a sacred scene (especially when the monkey reaches “to catch and eat a fly”), but there is precedent for this treatment of the Nativity of Jesus. One recalls the Wakefield Master’s Second Shepherds Play, which has always evoked uproarious laughter when properly staged. In any case, the farce here dissolves into holy awe when Joseph, quelling his irritation over the monkey, “Gave quiet meditation to the stars / And made no wars / And stood a lasting pattern for our Lord.”
Section two of this volume, according to Kibler’s introductory note, “pays tribute to the figures of the Fugitive-Agrarian movement and reflects my move from the city to the country in 1989 ….” In fact, only two of the poems in this section explicitly reference Fugitive poets: one written in homage to Allen Tate and another lamenting the death of Andrew Lytle. However, there is a fine poem, “Message On An Old Chalkboard,” dedicated to the memory of the Agrarian writer John Donald Wade, which is a bit obscure but may allude to Wade’s memorable contribution to I’ll Take My Stand, “The Life and Death of Cousin Lucius.” In that biographical sketch, we learn that Lucius, son of a plantation family, served for many years as a schoolteacher in a south Georgia academy, and the poem’s speaker seems to be standing before an old slate chalkboard in an abandonded schoolroom, attempting to fathom the meaning of a “puzzling hieroglyph of closest wisdom” in traces of chalk never fully erased. The inscrutable marks stand as a metaphor for the now all but forgotten wisdom of men like Wade himself, who was also from a Georgia family and spent many years as a college teacher. But the poem is also a lament for the passing of a “nation made of husbandmen” and their replacement by “slick suburbanites / Whose virtues will not grow / In fields and fertile rows.”
Perhaps the best poem in section two is one called “For Dove and Flag, Grandpa Connelly’s Mules.” Based on memories, mostly his mother’s, of two mules, Dove and Flag, owned by his paternal grandfather, the poem is a touching agrarian statement. It would be too much to say that the mules are presented as formal symbols, but they do represent an older way of life—a time in the South when small family subsistence farming was how most people got by. Many of us who grew up in the South in the mid-twentieth century remember grandparents like these, tough, stoic men and women whose lives were bitterly demanding and who typically relied on brute mulepower to pull their plows—at least until tractors became more common. “No doubt,” Kibler writes, “my mother could have told us more / About our two-mule family farm. / But she now too is sadly gone / And with her recollections of a way of life / So hard and honest as the day was long.” But it is the image of the grandfather which offers us the most enduring memory of those agrarian days:
“Your grandpa always dearly loved
To walk behind a mule,” my mother said.
And he was faithful still to fought-for-soil,
His father’s own in days of ’65,
Until Depression came in ‘33
When Dove and Flag were auctioned off
To distant rows and strangers hands,
With land and house and all.
Those final lines, written without a hint of sentimentality, employ a stylistic restraint makes the poem one of the most memorable in Beyond The Stone.
Section three of this volume is made up of poems spoken in the voice of Chauncey Dolittle, one of the main characters in Kibler’s quartet of novels known as the Clay Bank series. Chauncey, like Kibler himself, inherited a family plantation and, in the poems featured here, spends much of his time observing and communing with the natural world, celebrating its glories, as he does in “Summer Morning Dawns on the Plantation”:
Throw wide the flowered curtains
And pin them to their stays.
The orange bristling ball
Peeps o’er the woodland wall
And sings up on the boxwood lanes
And the river bottom canes.
The air is cool and fresh on lawn
At new creation’s early dawn.
Especially appealing here is the opening use of the imperative voice, as if the poet is urging the reader (who might otherwise sleep obliviously through the miracle of the sun’s rising) to join him before the window to share in the vision of this new creation.
The best poems in the Chauncey section have the quality of an almost Japanese austerity, as in the haiku tradition. Consider the evocative, honed-down lines of “Mutability”:
Images of the past
When least expected come
The clustered snow drops at the gate
In yard so bare of all but clay,
The shining roofs of tin in rain,
The darting deer too shy to stay,
Two rows of jonquils
Made to form a path
Down which my silent youth
Has stepped away.
Or consider “Chauncey’s Spring Song For An Old House”:
My candle burns within its crystal bell.
It makes the shadows dance,
Projecting sprays of sarvis,
Drifts of silverbell—
Patterned lace
Upon the parlour wall.
Kibler does this kind of thing very well, and one wishes that this volume included more examples of such brief poems in which the images themselves do most of the talking.
The fourth and final section of this volume features several remarkable poems, a number of them focused on Southern heritage and memory, as in “Hallowed,” which calls upon the reader to remember that “Her hills were battlefields / Her sons lie in the sod / Her sunset creeks still color red / The hearts-blood of remembered dead ….” The true owners of Southern soil, the poet insists, are those who remember: “True keepers of the fabled land / Who to the future turn the face / And know whereon they firmly stand.” In another poem, “The Land Remains,” we are reminded, lest we despair over the modern despoilation of the earth, that in the end “Tall towers bend / Strong cables break / The grids all fail / The land prevails.”
In 2021 Jim Kibler was airlifted by helicopter for emergency heart surgery, an experience that became fodder for one of the most unusual poems in this volume: “The Patient Watches His Heart On Ultrasound.” In these lines he marvels that we have all become “Screen people now”; indeed, we are able to watch on screens our hearts in their “contractions bold.” He relates how “the image comforts for a time” (perhaps because we witness the heart still beating!), but in the end the speaker shrugs away such virtual consolation:
Enough of that!
There are some things a mortal should not see.
I turn my face away
And live to face another day.
We can be thankful that Jim Kibler survived that experience, for he has been one of the “true keepers of of the fabled land.” For many decades as a writer, editor, teacher, public speaker, poet and planter, he has been a curator of Southern memory, performing that vocation with passion, humilty and boundless good humor.
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“Many of us who grew up in the South in the mid-twentieth century remember grandparents like these, tough, stoic men and women whose lives were bitterly demanding and who typically relied on brute mulepower to pull their plows—at least until tractors became more common.”
Oh my, yes indeed!
The lines from “For Dove and Flag” could not be more moving. The words “dearly loved” remind of the way my own people used to speak. They also named their mules, horses and oxen and had great affection for them. And equally heartwarming are the lines quoted from “Mutability.” As for “wistful sentimentality,” we need a lot more of that during these dark times. Excellent poetry Dr. Kibler.