Yesterday's love returns as today's love song, and Cathy Smith Bowers signs her own superb versions with distinctive wisdom, grit, and remarkable range. Erotic of familial, happy or heartbroken, elegaic or hunted, these poems find their right shapes in the dramas of everyday speech and the pressures of rigorous craft. The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas is poetry in the Key of terrific. —David BakerThese are poems of passion and rage; of quiet reflection and of exhilaration. They express in precise language—whose impetus is the poet's clear vision—the deepest yearnings of ordinary people: young and old, health and infirm, they are all looking for, in a terrifyingly indifferent universe, their moment of perfect beauty, joy, or peace. In her poems, Cathy Smith offers us a rare glimpse of nature x-rayed to reveal its calcified skeleton, its black soul: "In the shortened days / the trees grow pornographic, / think their time is up, / last chance for love."Yet this world of betrayal is also a place where a few lucky ones can still be surprised by beauty: "like stars thrown out / against the night."In The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas Cathy Smith comes to terms with the power granted by pain and with the terrible beauty to found in ordinary lives. —Judith Ortiz CoferCathy Smith Bowers thinks in metaphor; her poems combine a measured, adult sadness with the exotic pleasure, first learned in childhood, of tracing connections and resemblances. And like a true poet she honors—and not only in her poem "The Flower We Could Not Name"—the considerable part of our experience that lies beyond the call of even her bright articulations. What a fine book she's given us! —William MatthewsCathy Smith Bowers was born and reared in Lancaster, South Carolina, where she attended the University of South Carolina at Lancaster. She went on to receive Bachelors of Arts and Masters of Arts and Teaching degrees in English from Winthrop College in Rock Hill, South Carolina. She is a winner of the South Carolina Poetry Fellowship and the 1990 General Electric Award for Younger Writers. She lives in Rock Hill and teaches English and Foundations of Liberal Learning at Queens College in Charlotte, North Carolina.Cathy Smith Bowers' emergence as a poet has been astonishing in the degree that she has taken possession of loss and made it a gift, and she has done it everywhere with courageous wit and in language that sings as well as it talks. And what a journey this poetry marks. From the Carolina mill town of her birth to a Buddhist temple in Malaysia, she plots the cartography of a personal life in which we are made welcome by that luckiest empathy, style. These are poems that love us as well as themselves. To read them is to touch a life. —Rodney Jones

The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas: Poems (Walt McDonald First-Book Series)

Literature & Fiction

Bowers, Cathy Smith

Poetry

Texas Tech University Press

This book was Cathy Smith Bowers' first book of poetry. It was first published by the Texas Tech University Press in 1992, where it was the first winner of the TTUP First Book Award (subsequently named the Walt McDonald Award.) The hard cover edition (ISBN 0-89672-301-1) went out of print in 1997, and Iris Press brought out this high quality paperback edition that same year. This book contains 48 poems. There is also a preface by Walter McDonald and a forward by Stephen Corey.

The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas

Iris Press

This is Cathy Smith Bowers' second book of poetry, and follows her highly acclaimed and award winning first book, The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas. The organizing element of this new book derives from journeys, both geographical and emotional.

Traveling in Time of Danger

Iris Pr

The Candle I Hold Up to See You by Cathy Smith Bowers is a book of poetry. The book is divided into five sections which deal with a wide range of subjects, including spirituality, Southern culture, loss and grief, and humor.

The Candle I Hold Up to See You

Iris Pub Group Inc

Former North Carolina Poet Laureate Cathy Smith Bowers is celebrated with this impressive volume of her collected poems. Four complete collections: The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas; Traveling in Time of Danger; A Book of Minutes; The Candle I Hold Up to See You, with an introduction by another former North Carolina Poet Laureate, Fred Chappell, who says, "Hardship, cruelty, heartbreak, bleak sorrow-these sad themes are plentiful in the pages of Cathy Smith Bowers. But in its smoldering heart, her poetry holds, like the piñata in 'The Party,' a 'sweet, dark center.'"

The Collected Poems of Cathy Smith Bowers

Press 53

Cathy Smith Bowers' The Abiding Image gives testament to poet and editor Alfred A. Poulin's belief that "the very act of writing poetry is an affirmative one, saying no to any force that would destroy the human spirit." Part handbook, part memoir, part stand-up comedy routine, this collection of essays and lectures will provide inspiration and guidance for any writer, reader, and teacher of poetry. From those who have no idea where to begin to those in need of practical and innovative ways to reboot and revive, this book is for you.

The Abiding Image: Inspiration and Guidance for Beginning Writers, Readers, and Teachers of Poetry

History & Criticism

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