Reading Georgann Eubanks’s Rural Astronomy (EastOver Press June 2025) felt like revisiting a hometown after a long absence—some of the landscape has changed, some of the houses sport new shutters, some of the memories are bittersweet, and the territory is both comforting and strange.
It’s no wonder that Eubanks leads readers through a literary journey with such a confident and capable manner. After all, she’s best known as the author of a series of guidebooks in the Literary Trails series, and she’s an accomplished poet as well. It’s the unexpected mastery of subtlety that surprises in these poems of childhood, family, nature, and the places of home that are both unique and universal.
Nostalgia is drawn tight, but never overwhelms in poems that recall life in the Blue Ridge. In “Women’s Work,” for example, a photo that doesn’t show the women reminds us of family feasts when mothers and grandmothers and aunts were kept busy in the kitchen, cooking and “…feeding the misery / of a woodstove in August.”
From that snapshot of life as it was for so many of us and our mothers, Eubanks picks up the theme of women again, in “Counting Change,” where women’s lives and rights are traced through coins:
“When Watts and bras started to burn,
the white men stopped minting
mythic women, Native Americans,
and endangered species.”
This isn’t to say that Eubanks writes exclusively about women, but rather that she recognizes connections between people, land, tradition, and the everyday events that eventually surprise us with their significance. The found poems scattered throughout the collection highlight those mysteries and absurdities, from the message left for guests “At the Inn” to instructions for using a “Coin Operated Scenic Viewer.”
Rural Astronomy is a quilt composed of bits and snips, anthems and acknowledgment, that Eubanks stitches together to form a covering of both comfort and challenge. The poems evoke mountain flowers, farm life, simpler times and traffic congestion, loss and gain, pain and compassion.
The same keen eye that spots poetry in “Three Word Signs” and the “Rural Electric Newsletter” pulls out details from the people and the scenery around her, details that do double, even triple duty as they
Rural Astronomy is a welcome breeze in the night that waves away clouds and shows us a clear view of the stars and constellations that, like the people and land that form us, are always there even when we don’t look.
Georgann Eubanks
Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgann Eubanks graduated from Duke University in public policy studies and has published poetry, fiction, and nonfiction over the years. She was director of the Duke Writers Workshop for twenty years, and then launched the Table Rock Writers Workshop, still held each fall in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Over the years she has served as president of statewide organizations including the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association, Arts North Carolina, and Humanities North Carolina. Georgann divides her time between Carrboro in the North Carolina Piedmont and Little Switzerland, a village on the Blue Ridge Parkway.
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