Review of "Belonging" by Britt Kaufmann

Review written by Janice Willis Barnett, author of Unicoi and Limestone Cove.

I pick up Belonging by Britt Kaufmann and the book opens to “Hand-Me-Down Gift,” the poem on its center page. “Ahhh yes…,” I say to myself and re-relish reading this poem the narrator offers to her children: the gift of a childhood like her mother gave her, “refashioned” for them.

Giving to others via a refashioned life is one of the themes at the heart of Belonging. In “A Sturdy Weave,” a rag rug serves as the metaphor for the refashioned life of a grandmother “rolled out functional again” to “protect the next generation of toddling walkers from hardwood.” The poem speaks eloquently to an older woman’s sacrifice of time and a quiet life to care for her family.

“Mount Revelation” reveals other refashioned lives: the lives of mountain families driven off their land “to put soup in bellies” and the lives of the new landowners, who “have gated the way” to their second homes. Kaufmann uses the language of the King James Bible to guide the reader along the ridges of those who have “sold their own inheritance” to those who “failed to build an altar to God, so wend their way down Mount Revelation to sit in pews with their brothers and sisters.” The journey is unflinching, its end a revelation as the congregation

...joins the old quilter

who casts her eyes unto the hills,

sees those mansions through the eye

of her needle as she threads it to bind

together layers of a new comforter.

In this last stanza of “Mount Revelation,” there is a suggestion of reconciliation between the culture of the “old quilter” and that of the wealthy newcomers. The reconciling factor is the sacrament of faith. This same coming together of newcomer with the existing mountain culture is suggested in “These Lost Counties.”

It’s always hard hard hard work,

to make your way in here,

to live in these oldest mountains.

At the end of the poem, the narrator is “among kindred spirits of unlike minds.” The poem concludes with

Here, I find myself

in these Lost Counties,

and I am bound.

In “These Lost Counties,” the narrator has turned her life as a newcomer to western North Carolina’s mountains “into craft into art.” The result is reconciliation in this place “where kindred spirits of unlike minds . . . clear space to test our mettle against the isolation, set our own standards.”

This poet’s standards are measured by the heart; the spirit in her words like that in “Crocus Courage,” the first poem in Belonging. Take this short but spirited collection of poems to that place you go when you need your soul refreshed and let it renew you with the same courage as crocuses that “risk winter . . . and sleep through summer lazy, covertly plotting fresh color.”