South Carolina Books

This book is perfect for anyone interested in their Irish roots, it is a definitive look at the Irish in Charleston.

reviews:
Between Home and History

BY CRAIG BRANDHORST
Free Times Issue #21.16 :: 04/16/2008

Ed Madden got home last Thursday at 3 a.m.

The USC English professor, activist and poet had a perfectly legitimate reason to be out so late, of course -- namely the mini-tour he had been on to promote his debut poetry collection, Signals, published last month by USC Press. In less than a week, Madden gave readings in Arkansas, Missouri and Oklahoma before wrapping up in Newport, Ark., where he conducted a writers' workshop for high school students at his alma mater.

According to emails from the road and subsequent comments made during a conversation at Flinn Hall, where Madden serves as associate director of Women's Studies, it was a gratifying trip. And tired as he claimed to be as he unlocked his third-floor office, fresh from a lengthy meeting across campus and toting a 3 p.m. bag lunch, he appeared no worse for the wear -- even as he mentioned another workshop he was scheduled to lead that evening.

"It's not typical," he assures me regarding his recently hectic schedule.

Maybe not, but there's no denying Madden's energy, which will have to sustain him through an upcoming home stand highlighted by events at Hunter-Gatherer (book launch party, 6-8 p.m. on Sunday), ifART (art show and reading on April 23 from 7 to 9 p.m.) and the S.C. Center for the Book (reading on April 29 at noon).

Winner of the third annual South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, sponsored by the South Carolina Poetry Initiative and judged this year by poet-playwright Afaa Weaver, Signals is a deceptively slim collection of deceptively spare poems, most written in couplets and tercets. And while certain motifs lend the collection an undeniable arc, and Madden's fascination with regional flora positions many of the poems within an obvious literary tradition, the poet himself defies quick categorization.

"I know one reviewer has already called me a nature poet," Madden says, "and I suppose there's some accuracy in that. But I'm more interested in how we remember, how our personal and cultural histories are part of how we see the world around us."
In Madden's case, these "personal and cultural histories" owe largely to the contemporary gay experience, though he also refers to the neglected histories of civil rights activists and long-dead slaves. Meanwhile, "the world around us" is essentially the American South. Signals does include poems set elsewhere (in "Flaneur," for example, two lovers hunt pottery and cuff links in a Paris flea market), but it is the rural Arkansas of Madden's childhood that lends the book its heart, and the political history of his adopted South Carolina that provides its retractable edge.

While local readers may be interested in Madden's swipes at Strom Thurmond ("Here, or the White Boy on the Bus") and the Confederate flag ("Confederates"), however, the poet is at his best in smaller moments.
"As an openly gay man, I know all too well that the personal is political," Madden explains. "Intimate relationships, friendships, domestic ritual, any of these may be political when who you are and how you love is a concern of the state."


This is nowhere more apparent than in the poem "Signals," in which the speaker and an unnamed companion stand outside Fort Moultrie, on Sullivan's Island, contemplating not the battlements, or even the loaded historical significance of Fort Sumter -- the "distant ruin" across the water -- but everything else that informs the moment. The poem's final three stanzas:

In the parking lot, we smell the marsh beyond us,
And the sweetness of the tea olive nearby.

A bare tree suddenly blossoms in blackbird --
Strange fruit shining in the morning sun.

A sulfur butterfly blows across the lawn.

The poem still addresses history, and its images are rich with political possibility, especially in context, but the immediate effect is a subtle one. Madden wants us to imagine the metaphorical possibilities of place, it seems, and from these to glimpse something otherwise unimaginable.

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Madden's work reveals Southern roots
Marjory Wentworth
Charleston :: Post and Courier :: Sunday, March 23, 2008

For the past three springs, the University of South Carolina Press has published a book of poems by the winner of the S.C. Poetry Book Prize. Previous winners are Ray McManus for "Driving Through the Country Before You Are Born" and Susan Meyers' award-winning book "Keep and Give Away." This year's winner is USC associate professor of English Ed Madden. "Signals" is Ed's first book-length collection.
Madden is a Southerner by birth, and he also was educated in the region. Like all of our great Southern writers, his poems are rooted in history, culture and landscape. A handful of the poems are set in Europe, but they still fit well into the overall structure. Almost every poem in the collection has a place name in the title. The imagery is so accomplished that the poems are like vivid snapshots in a photo album. Most of the poems are written in couplets, and this pattern creates a lyric unity that is enormously satisfying.
Objects are described in an almost sacred manner with an attention to detail that heightens our focus. It feels as though you are looking through a zoom lens, but everything is examined through this poet's eyes. Man-made objects literally take on the attributes of natural objects. In a poem called "Flaneur," which describes walking through a Paris flea market with his lover, Madden describes "a pearlescent jar in the afternoon sun,/the base blue, the crystalline glaze like ice,/like prisms in the hot August light."
"Signals" is essentially a beautiful collection of nature poems. Whether the poem is set in his native Arkansas, the South Carolina Lowcountry, or somewhere between, there is a reverence for place and the plants and animals that inhabit there. The book's title poem is about Fort Moultrie on Sullivan's Island, where Ed had a poetry residency a few years ago. Written much like a haiku, it is filled with immediate images and all the sights and sounds filling the air. It is fascinating to note that in this poem set at a fort, there are birds, trees, butterflies, the omnipresent sea, but only a brief mention of the smallest actual element of the fort: its flags. Its history is subtly buried in the description of what is found there, but nature transcends the passage of time and dominates.
Marjory Wentworth is South Carolina's poet laureate.

This book was one I could not put down. Every chapter kept you in suspense.

This book traces the development of shallops along the Atlantic seaboard and Chesapeake Bay from open work boats suitable for a number of uses to fully decked vessels employed in the offshore fisheries of New England or for freighting service on the Delaware River. The book is illustrated with sketches of the various types of sloops and shallops afloat as well as line plans showing the development of hull forms.

This book provides not only an easy to read, step-by-step way to start your own business; but, the authors have included many place to write notes so you can keep your focus on starting your business, as well as all of the numbers and forms you would need to ensure you get your business started as quickly and painlessly as possible. One of the sections I especially enjoyed was the appendix in the back with the telephone numbers and addresses of all of the parties you need to contact with spaces for notes on when you contacted them, who you spoke with, what you talked about, etc. If you are considering starting your own business in South Carolina, you can do it without this book, but I would not recommend it. Oasis Press has simplified the process tremendously.

SNOWBIRD GRAVY AND DISHPAN PIE: Mountain People Recall, by Patsy Moore Ginns, 209 pages, illustrated by J.L. Osborne Jr., North Carolina

Unlike the model dour New Englander, Southern mountain folk love to tell stories, and the ones born around the end of the 19th century were very much aware that they had started out in one era and lived into another one, very different. This was my grandparents' generation, and they liked to tell about the old days.
In the 1970s and early '80s, Patsy Ginns, a teacher, collected stories from around 20 men and women who had grown up in western North Carolina. The oldest was born in 1979, the youngest in the 1920s.

For me, reading "Snowbird Gravy and Dishpan Pie" was like being a little kid at family reunions again. Ginns' old folks were way more country than my family was, but their world view was about the same as I remember: church, long walks, few money, haints and spirits, play parties, neighborliness, occasional hard feelings and violence.

As Stanley Hicks, one of the more talkative sources, says, "It was hard to get a nickel."

Ginns breaks up the recollections by category: school, community, work etc. So the longest entry is about three pages. Some entries, when the people fell into the easy, loping mountain style of talking, she has typeset as if it were free verse, which it almost is.

To me the most interesting personality is Ray Hicks, apparently Stanley's younger brother. The Hicks boys were a handful, when young, but Ray got religion -- which he explains at confusing length -- and became a preacher. Not, as slowly becomes apparent, a very uptight one.

"Snowbird Gravy and Dishpan Pie" is also full of bits of lore about living in the Southern mountains, many of them mostly forgotten in daily life, only preserved here and in books like Foxfire. Some of the lore here is more obscure than even the obscurest of the Foxfire collections, which came from a generation later.

The volume is liberally illustrated with evocative pen-and-ink drawings of rustic scenes by J.L. Osborne Jr. Charming to look at but not so charming to live in, these vistas were everywhere when I was growing up. It's hard to find them nowadays, and if you do, like as not there's a big highway down the middle, or a warehouse on the horizon.

[...] This five volume history of the victorian bourgeois follows a freudian schematic: the first volume dealt with love, the second with sex, and this volume with agression.

This book was my favorite of the three I've read so far. Gay picks apart the Victorian penchant for cloaked agression with admirable scholastic fortitude. His discussion of Foucault's theory of prisons is a high light for this entire five volume set.

His critique of what he calls the "social control" theorists is that they fail to take into account the ability of the powerful to delude themselves into thinking they are doing the right thing, even when they are most assuredly not.

Why stop here? Only two more volumes to go...

Most of the county records in this book are relevant to the Upstate of South Carolina. It has been a most important tool for me in my research. It doesn't include all of the Upstate counties, but it certainly has a good sampling of wills, deeds, etc. without making a trip to the library.

of the 2 ww1 fiction works i,ve read,All Quiet on the Western Front and Johnny Got his Gun,I would have to say that this book is of the same quality and genre. It presents the point of view from the "grunt' in the trenches.These are not the kind of books a person would read for enjoyment,although a person could make a case for it.They are more the historical type that can make a more humane person for the read.The Coward was really interesting,it was about a British WW1 soldier who deliberately wounds himself to escape from the trenches on the eve of a major German assault in 1918.He tries to rationalize his "cowardice" but the letting down of his comrades haunts him thoughout the book and you leave the book realizing his desertion will haunt him throughout his life.At the field hospital he expresses jealousy of his comrads in the trenches,but not enough to want to return.He rehashes then rationalizes,condemned like Sisyphus,only instead of having push the boulder to the top and have it fall again,he must feel the guilt while he cashes a wounded soldier pension check.And so on!

I've read almost every book in the America the beautiful seiries. They're great for Reports and papers. They give you so much information thats really intureting; not just facts. It is such a shame that Children's press is taking this wonderful seiries out of print. Buy these books now before they run out, belive me