Georgann Eubanks. Rural Astronomy: Poems. EastOver Press, 2025. Reviewed by Linda Parsons, March 8, 2025.
James Agee’s prose poem, “Knoxville: Summer 1915,” opens his autobiographical novel A Death in the Family, a story of summer and memory and loss: “By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night.” A similar feeling pervades Georgann Eubanks’ debut poetry collection, Rural Astronomy, though somewhat less of loss and more of wonder and tribute.
Known best as a nonfiction writer learned in the palette of wild things and for her literary leadership in North Carolina, Eubanks’ turn to poetry brings her (and us) up close and personal to what has shaped her as both passionate observer and writer, a “professional sightseer,” she calls herself. Through the lens of a “found poem,” a coin-operated scenic viewer, her intention is clear: “Bring distant / points of interest / within close range / with the use of this / machine.”
Indeed, poetry has been called an “empathy machine,” carrying an emotional charge that deepens awareness of ourselves and our world, our connectedness. Eubanks wields this charge well in her spare but painterly way, especially as she weaves indelible time with her grandparents, Stella and Bomer, through the collection, “influenza orphans,” farmed out to relatives with varying results.
The title poem, “Rural Astronomy,” echoes the solitude of Agee’s prologue: “Tonight, the moon is a crock / pouring blue john through the skylight. / By June I must rise and take / my face right up to the glass / to drink in the pearly angle of light.” The use of the old term blue john (buttermilk) harkens back to the speaker’s formative days with her grandparents in the country.
In “Sweet Potato Harvest,” the young speaker helps her grandfather in the rows, loading the wheelbarrow: “gently lifting every hobbled tuber / like the unwashed feet / of a whole Bible’s worth / of lame children seeking cure.” The poem’s end is the stunner, Bomer saying: “Nothing but old roots… But they keep.”
Like the grim reality of nature itself, Eubanks presents a clear-eyed childhood. The grandfather who kindly guides her in the potato field is the same man who traps and easily kills the blue jay to keep it from robbing the robins and eating the bluebird eggs. The same who drives a nail in the turtle’s head, repeating his orphan’s tale: “You make a meal from what you catch.”
At his side, the speaker learns the hard lesson that we are always living among “the quick and the dead.” Still, those of us lucky enough to experience the overall good of such grandparents know the truth of their rootedness in our lives, how their memory keeps sustaining us long after they have passed into spirit.
Equally interspersed are meditations on the seasons, the bounty of gardens, the stitching of birds, the woods and critters around her Blue Ridge cabin. The seasons frame these subjects in their steady, dependable orbits. Some thoughts on winter from “Redemption”:
I can see every mountaintop,
islands beyond these gray weathered planks.
The deck of this cabin could be the prow of a ship.
Then, east to west, the hard wind sweeps in,
bare limbs wave, and for a moment I believe
this whole place has set sail.
And, of course, gardens are wholly bound in the wheeling of seasons: their winter rest, spring leap, summer ripening, autumn coloratura. The speaker carries the gardens of her childhood in mind and heart and pen. Her poems about okra and scuppernongs are especially delightful and freshly imagistic—the okra’s furred green spikes “circumcised by wind,” “white bullet eggs loaded / in skin that purples again / in the last high heat / of the season” and scuppernongs “shed of old skins / and sieved of seed, / the flesh boiled down / to be redeemed.” So many sensory details like the communion wafer (or Baptist cracker) taken on the tongue and raised to the sacredness of body and blood.
It's fitting that midway comes the heart of the book, “Their Gardens.” Here Eubanks announces her legacy of all that has come before, telling us that she is the keeper of the land that grew her, the loved people who worked it, and all that blossomed and twined in and around it: the necklace of poppies, pansies by the shed, the catalpa and its caterpillars for bait, the lonely pear by the pond. Somehow it doesn’t matter that the land was “sold for mansions” because she has memorized the landscape like a song or poem clasped in a locket. Poignantly, she writes, “I am the last among the flourishing.”
Above all, perhaps, this is a book of travel—young days in Georgia, her grandparents’ dead-end road, her parents together then apart, Alaska and Chicago, rural to urban and back again, all the way to a cabin in the Blue Ridge, its deep woods that now own her—travel always being as much within as without.
And here we are, as Agee wrote, “on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night,” transfixed by both the sorrow and the joy of our time on this earth. “I shine light,” Eubanks writes, and so she does in hopefully only the first of more collections. In the end, all of it, incalculable as the stars in our lives’ sweeping constellation, a brilliance that points us homeward.
James Agee’s prose poem, “Knoxville: Summer 1915,” opens his autobiographical novel A Death in the Family, a story of summer and memory and loss: “By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night.” A similar feeling pervades Georgann Eubanks’ debut poetry collection, Rural Astronomy, though somewhat less of loss and more of wonder and tribute.
Known best as a nonfiction writer learned in the palette of wild things and for her literary leadership in North Carolina, Eubanks’ turn to poetry brings her (and us) up close and personal to what has shaped her as both passionate observer and writer, a “professional sightseer,” she calls herself. Through the lens of a “found poem,” a coin-operated scenic viewer, her intention is clear: “Bring distant / points of interest / within close range / with the use of this / machine.”
Indeed, poetry has been called an “empathy machine,” carrying an emotional charge that deepens awareness of ourselves and our world, our connectedness. Eubanks wields this charge well in her spare but painterly way, especially as she weaves indelible time with her grandparents, Stella and Bomer, through the collection, “influenza orphans,” farmed out to relatives with varying results.
The title poem, “Rural Astronomy,” echoes the solitude of Agee’s prologue: “Tonight, the moon is a crock / pouring blue john through the skylight. / By June I must rise and take / my face right up to the glass / to drink in the pearly angle of light.” The use of the old term blue john (buttermilk) harkens back to the speaker’s formative days with her grandparents in the country.
In “Sweet Potato Harvest,” the young speaker helps her grandfather in the rows, loading the wheelbarrow: “gently lifting every hobbled tuber / like the unwashed feet / of a whole Bible’s worth / of lame children seeking cure.” The poem’s end is the stunner, Bomer saying: “Nothing but old roots… But they keep.”
Like the grim reality of nature itself, Eubanks presents a clear-eyed childhood. The grandfather who kindly guides her in the potato field is the same man who traps and easily kills the blue jay to keep it from robbing the robins and eating the bluebird eggs. The same who drives a nail in the turtle’s head, repeating his orphan’s tale: “You make a meal from what you catch.”
At his side, the speaker learns the hard lesson that we are always living among “the quick and the dead.” Still, those of us lucky enough to experience the overall good of such grandparents know the truth of their rootedness in our lives, how their memory keeps sustaining us long after they have passed into spirit.
Equally interspersed are meditations on the seasons, the bounty of gardens, the stitching of birds, the woods and critters around her Blue Ridge cabin. The seasons frame these subjects in their steady, dependable orbits. Some thoughts on winter from “Redemption”:
I can see every mountaintop,
islands beyond these gray weathered planks.
The deck of this cabin could be the prow of a ship.
Then, east to west, the hard wind sweeps in,
bare limbs wave, and for a moment I believe
this whole place has set sail.
And, of course, gardens are wholly bound in the wheeling of seasons: their winter rest, spring leap, summer ripening, autumn coloratura. The speaker carries the gardens of her childhood in mind and heart and pen. Her poems about okra and scuppernongs are especially delightful and freshly imagistic—the okra’s furred green spikes “circumcised by wind,” “white bullet eggs loaded / in skin that purples again / in the last high heat / of the season” and scuppernongs “shed of old skins / and sieved of seed, / the flesh boiled down / to be redeemed.” So many sensory details like the communion wafer (or Baptist cracker) taken on the tongue and raised to the sacredness of body and blood.
It's fitting that midway comes the heart of the book, “Their Gardens.” Here Eubanks announces her legacy of all that has come before, telling us that she is the keeper of the land that grew her, the loved people who worked it, and all that blossomed and twined in and around it: the necklace of poppies, pansies by the shed, the catalpa and its caterpillars for bait, the lonely pear by the pond. Somehow it doesn’t matter that the land was “sold for mansions” because she has memorized the landscape like a song or poem clasped in a locket. Poignantly, she writes, “I am the last among the flourishing.”
Above all, perhaps, this is a book of travel—young days in Georgia, her grandparents’ dead-end road, her parents together then apart, Alaska and Chicago, rural to urban and back again, all the way to a cabin in the Blue Ridge, its deep woods that now own her—travel always being as much within as without.
And here we are, as Agee wrote, “on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night,” transfixed by both the sorrow and the joy of our time on this earth. “I shine light,” Eubanks writes, and so she does in hopefully only the first of more collections. In the end, all of it, incalculable as the stars in our lives’ sweeping constellation, a brilliance that points us homeward.