The rugged outdoors, gruesome hunting, Central American cultures and the conveniences of modern city life.
Rose McLarney, 2011 and 2013 National Poetry Series winner, covered all of this and more during the first Third Thursday Poetry Reading of the semester at the Jule Collins Smith Museum.
More than 50 patrons listened intently as McLarney read poems from her newest book, It’s Day Being Gone, along with other miscellaneous poems.
Born in Franklin, North Carolina, Rose McLarney grew up in both the mountains of North Carolina and the tropical climates of Central America.
McLarney’s father is a biologist that was based in Latin America and when she was younger she would spend part of the year with him. According to McLarney, this period in her life is reflected in a section of her newest book.
“The first [section of the book] is based in folklore and Appalachian ballads,” McLarney said. “Then the middle section goes abroad.”
McLarney said the poems are about the people, wildlife and cultures of the two areas where she grew up.
The gritty wildlife of the Appalachia flows seamlessly into the exotic culture of Central America, with common themes such as hunting and relationships, McLarney said.
The exact settings of her poems are ambiguous, to preserve a creative license in her work. McLarney hopes the descriptive nature of the poems creates such a vivid picture in the audience’s mind that it is hardly necessary to wonder where precisely the events occurred.
The Appalachia is home to McLarney and that is where she stayed for the first part of her adult life. She earned her undergraduate degree from Warren Wilson College in North Carolina, but after a short stint in the professional world she went back to school at the prestigious Master of Fine Arts Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
After teaching at her alma mater, she finally moved out of the Appalachia all the way to Oregon.
“The first place that I moved when I decided to leave the mountains would have been hard, regardless of where it was,” McLarney said.
Oregon was “not home” to McLarney, who moved there to do a writing fellowship with her husband. In the middle of nowhere, she was surrounded by beautiful nature, but cut off from the real world.
After this fellowship she taught poetry at Oklahoma State University. Oklahoma was “a very foreign landscape,” and far from the mountains where she grew up.
“By the time I got [to Alabama]…even though as I noted the landscape and culture are not the same, in a way it felt more like home than some places that I have been,” McLarney said. “I’m only four hours away from home. There are certainly aspects of southern culture…that run throughout.”
After her move to Alabama, McLarney wrote a few poems about her new home – reflecting on the past, commenting on the heat and describing the cultural differences.
Throughout many of McLarney’s poems is a social commentary, whether it be comparing human cultures of different countries, modern day technology or issues such as climate change.
These issues are brought up in the third and final section of McLarney’s book. McLarney said it explores material from the first section, but “approaches it in a more contemporary way.” Some poems are light hearted and funny, while others deal with more serious topics.
“Environmental concerns are something that has been underlying in my writing,” McLarney said. “But it’s only been in this book that I’ve set myself the challenge of trying to write about those things directly.”
By traveling around the world and moving across the country, McLarney is able to write about the truth of human kind.
Her poems are able to show those that may not have the chance to travel that “people’s stories are similar regardless of where they are,” and perhaps that we are not all as different as we may think.
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