James E. Kibler, Beyond the Stone: Poems of Tribute and Remembrance. Shotwell Publishing, 2025.
The publication of James Kibler’s second book of verse is more than just another book. It is an event in Southern culture, a hallmark in Kibler’s career as a consummate man of letters.
A consummate man of letters describes a writer who does outstanding work in a variety of fields. Kibler is the top scholar of those who have established William Gilmore Simms as a significant scholarly interest (despite lies told on Wikipedia). He founded the Simms Review, has provided the definitive edition of Simms poetry, and discovered many unsigned or pseudonymous Simms writings.
All that makes for a hardworking and useful career of outstanding scholarship that surpasses 99% of his contemporaries. But he is also the author of the classic nonfiction Our Fathers’ Fields, of a novel quartet The Clay Bank series about the contemporary South which has received high praise, and two volumes of penetrating very original verse.
A consummate man of letters is one who excels in multiple aspects of literature–poetry, fiction, essays. And other forms. In American literature this is an almost entirely Southern thing. Kibler joins the elite Southern company of Poe, Simms, Garrett, Chappell, Berry, and Brosman, as a writer outstanding in three or more forms.
Kibler’s first book of verse, Poems from Scorched Earth, has a hard hitting and unapologetic Southern viewpoint. It is now hard to obtain, I believe, and needs to be republished. Beyond the Stone contains a versatile collection of verse written since the first one. I will leave a literary description to others better qualified while noticing the significance of its appearance.
