Kendra Hamilton’s “Southern Living” appears in her 2006 collection The Goddess of Gumbo and in Camille T. Dungy’s excellent anthology, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry.

If the magazine Southern Living comes to mind when we first encounter the title of Kendra Hamilton “Southern Living,” we might expect that the poem focuses on how one lives a well-managed, comfortable Southern life.  And perhaps Hamilton means to play off the gardening advice from such a magazine as she writes a poem about the speaker’s love for her garden.

But of course “Southern living” has other associations—such as those that flavor Hamilton’s collection The Goddess of Gumbo: like  how New Orleans is a place where the “legend” of passion devolves into a “skinny-dip in a hotel pool no bigger than [a] kitchen sink,” like  how Beale Street has become “retro”—“so bright and yet not tawdry”—and how Charleston has been made “strangely void” by “Urban Renewal.”  And Southern living for Hamilton has other undertones.  She has the memory of finding and returning to the graves of slaves and “Never knowing who they were.”   And, for her, Southern living means imagining—with vivid truth—a slave “at her milking, muscles clenching / then rippling as her fingers /stroked the tensile teats / for this hiss, the thin, blue gruel.”

The poem “Southern Living” celebrates a speaker—a Southern black woman—who has found a fulfilling relationship with her garden.  In creating this love, she is a descendent of slaves and other black women who have worked the land.   And the poem modifies the georgic tradition.

With ironic misdirection, the poem opens with words that call to mind an abusive relationship.  The speaker’s lover is “ungentle” and, though without meaning to, leaves the speaker with bruises and cuts and a scar.  The speaker forgets to attend to her looks.  But this lover is the speaker’s garden and not the “devoted” but stony-hearted man with whom she “fought” in a previous relationship.  While living with this man she struggled to cultivate “barren ground” into the “dim-cramped” garden that produced plants with “blighted stem.”  Her new, more productive garden is her “true lover.”  She feels a passion that she has “never felt . . . for any man.”  Loving her garden means she can be “in love with possibility” and that she can be “ravished by order yet ever open to the wild.”  Her poem is a song of praise to a God, Who—a She—has blessed her “with a love like this before I die.”  The speaker has, in a way, created her own Eden, where the serpent is present as—and no more threatening than—“an adder’s tongue dappling / the shade bed.”  In her garden “azaleas and lilacs” resurrect “from the dead.”  And “on [her] knees, / pouring sweat like a baptism,” she’s known “rapture at last.”  This rapture does not insure an afterlife, for, as a true lover, a garden will not survive its maker, “will die with the one who loved it,” leaving only a chance spray of roses to be noted by “an eye that can read the land.”

Men—Stanley Kunitz comes to mind—can be gardeners.   And, as Andrew Marvell suggests, a man can withdraw into happiness in a garden.   So perhaps I am mistaken to think of the gardening poem as a mode of writing predominantly taken up by women.  And perhaps the feminist thrust of “Southern Living” is something we can expect in a gardening poem.  But, if we include gardening poems as a subset of the georgic mode, we might clarify the force of Hamilton’s having written about a woman’s attachment to her garden.

Hamilton’s admirable celebration of her garden can be read as a georgic that highlights how working the earth can be a woman’s activity, even her central activity.  The speaker’s garden is not a space that she shares with a man.  And the poem is a georgic that steps away from being “cramped” by a tradition—as so often seen in georgic poems—that it is men who work the land.  Wendell Berry’s “Horses” might stand as representative of how the masculine voice predominates in the georgic.  “Horses” is poem about a man returning to using horses to plow his land, an activity he learned to practice from men.   The farmer—Berry—laments how to adoption of tractors caused “The songs of world” to die “in our ears as we went within / the uproar of the long syllable of” the internal combustion engine.  These lost songs where part of an “art,” “an essential discipline / A boy learned” by “following the example / of men.”  The boy learned from “the corrective gaze / of men.”  And, when learning the “terms and tones” to use when speaking to horses, he was learning the technique of men. Women are so absent from “Horses” that their exclusion goes unstated.

In contrast, the speaker of “Southern Living” insists that now she lives in “my house and garden.” It is “my own picket fence”; the steps from the house are “my steps.”  She surveys her creation—“what I have done.”  And “each bed” has been “dug / and planted myself.”  It is on “my knees” that she realizes the delight of cultivating her own garden.    She shares with us her own “meditative music.”  To use Berry’s word, she sets the “terms” of her endeavor.  And, with “the corrective gaze” of a woman, she writes her own georgic

—Bill