Cheryl Whitehead is both a gifted poet and a gifted storyteller—and these can be two distinct, albeit complimentary talents. In Distant Relations (Loblolly Press 2025), Whitehead weaves these dual talents together into an always engaging, often uncanny collection of poetry rich with family, nature, culture, and transcendency. Her verses reverberate with turmoil and grace, all carefully captured in stunning images and potent phrases.
That Whitehead is keenly observant is quickly obvious in her poems. The way she shares her observations can be memorizing and a bit mysterious. She excels in yen and yang couplings of images that can be startling yet stunning. For example, in her poem “Departed Passing Through,” there is the “honeysuckle roping poison ivy.” And in “American Sentences,” the “past is wood smoke / in a tangle of briars / & muscadines.”
The forty-six poems in the collection are precise, deliberate, impeccably well drawn, and lush with images so fine and detailed as if Cheryl Whitehead sees the world through a telephoto lens. In “A History of Wind,” she writes of “a stallion’s lashes” and of “[t]he tin roof’s curled corners.” In “Farm Fragments,” a “cap dangles on a porch rail” and there are “spider webs in the well house.” In “Family Portrait,” hanging from a rusted barb, “a burlap feed sack / snags & empties daylight.”
Her poems transform everyday items into more than the ordinary and she does so without resort to clanging simile or heavy metaphor, and with only the occasional gentle rhyme. With her subtle techniques and precise eye, she creates a vibrant new whole from apparently random pieces of things we might walk past each day and not notice. In this, she finds her art. As in “Assemblages,” where the poem’s speaker takes “a wheel, a shoe, a branch, a rope, / a piece of barbed wire, a broken lantern, / a milk bottle, a horse’s skull,” Whitehead strives like that narrator “to make some sense of all these things, / return somethin’ to earth.” Ultimately these and similar items become art, both to the speaker in “Assemblages,” and in this volume.
Whitehead’s storytelling within these works can be more subtle than a conspicuous, direct plot line, yet she conveys her tales of a rural family with a powerful voice. She writes of a woman named Dianne and reveals in her dedication that her mother’s name is Dianne. It might be a mistake to take the poems as literal memoir, yet without doubt, a stirring portrait of Dianne emerges from these poems. In “American Sentences,” we read that “Dianne’s dead husband / tends the fields of her mind / every summer evening.” But then, “[s]unlight & a bucketful / of rainwater scrub / Dianne’s mind clean.” Another glimpse of Dianne’s story in “Weather Report” shows her slamming storm shutters while “[t]he wind converts its malice / to a burst of gospel whim.” In “Shadows Keep House,” readers see “Dianne’s / rough hands / plunged / into the deep /of grease / & suds” while she hears “in the chilled / night air / the breath / of a whippoorwill.”
A father also appears repeatedly in these poems, sometimes as a source of conflict, sometimes rather as a ghost. In “Departed Passing Through,” the poet observes that: “My father returns as a field of tender / radishes in snow, bright green stems / & leaves holding on in white furrows.” And, in “Debris,” he is “a booted farmer with crows at his feet & fate / on his breath like the scent of smoke & peppermint” and “a charge of lightning on my horizon.” Poignantly, then there’s “[t]he father who lets language slip out of his grip, … . His fingers chase / language like bird dogs sniffing for / scent” in the poem “In His Mind He Views a Blizzard.”
Of all the poems in which a father is featured, perhaps the most haunting is “Landscape with Fog.”
Fog takes a bite of hay & stands
near a barbed-wire fence that
scrapes the underside of every
unfinished story.
*
A half-built house on the hill cannot breathe
when fog floats through soulless window
holes. A father with a rifle strides up the hill
& whispers to the fog: Haunt me.
All in all, this is a fine, evocative collection of poetry, well worth the reading—and rereading. To visit the world and the kith and kin found in Cheryl Whitehead’s Distant Relations is to visit a rich place, filled with vivid, vibrant life and meaning.
Cheryl Whitehead
Cheryl Whitehead is a teacher, musician, and poet from Snow Camp, North Carolina. Her chapbook, So Ghosts Might Stop Composing is available from Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in Mezzo Cammin, The Hopkins Review, Crab Orchard Review and other journals. She has been a finalist for the New Letters and Morton Marr Poetry Prizes and the Unicorn Press First Book Award. She won an emerging artist grant from the Astraea Foundation and received scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Quest Writers’ Conference and the North Carolina Writers’ Network. She currently teaches English at the Chatham Early College in Siler City, NC.
.
Leave a Reply