islandpacket.com - The Island Packet Online

Search Everything in the Lowcountry and the Coastal Empire.

Poet laureate pens our land

Add Comment

Painful images from Marjory Heath Wentworth's arrival in the Lowcountry clash with her soaring words Wednesday on the Statehouse steps as she fulfilled her primary duty as South Carolina's poet laureate.

Hurricane Hugo howled through her Sullivan's Island home one month after she moved from Brooklyn. Suddenly, her life was in chaos. A hectic evacuation was followed by martial law. The film company her husband came to work for went out of business.

She could hardly do her job as a book publicist in a home they couldn't live in for a year, a new baby in one arm, another in nursery school and a third one on the way.

That was in 1989, back when you still could get a funky house on Sullivan's Island for not much money. But it was an island, safe only as a broken-in metaphor for creative people. She felt isolated, in a strange culture in a land so unlike her native New England. She knew no one.

She and her family rebuilt their lives, just as the lush Lowcountry landscape did the same.

Wentworth soon found herself on a tour of the ACE Basin, a pristine swath of hundreds of thousands of acres between Charleston and Beaufort, preserved in their natural state.

"I began to write about it," she told me by phone Thursday. "It began to heal me a little bit."

Many are drawn to our ever-blooming land of muggy warmth. But Wentworth's connection to the Lowcountry became intensely personal. Being from the outside only heightened her appreciation for this place. Where she grew up, the world was gray for much of the year. Here, she still finds the simple palmetto frond a source of wonder.

Wentworth would publish a book of poems with monotype prints by Mary Edna Fraser, called "What the Water Gives Me." Her poems won awards, and she gained recognition for her "landscape poetry." It was soon-to-be first lady Jenny Sanford, then living on Sullivan's Island, who thought of Wentworth when it was discovered there was no one to read a poem at Gov. Mark Sanford's first inaugural in 2003. That duty falls to the poet laureate. The position was vacant.

Jenny Sanford spoke to Wentworth on a Friday, and at 9 a.m. the next Monday, someone on the phone wanted to know the title of the poem she would read. Wentworth said she didn't have one. She was told she had till 2 o'clock to come up with one. She was happy to oblige.

She would write "Rivers of Wind" as a sweeping look at the state. She drew inspiration from photographic images by Tom Blagden Jr., whose books she publicizes. She also was lifted by the metaphor of rivers running from the foothills to the sea, uniting us all.

Three months later, she was asked by the governor to be the state's poet laureate. What a thrill, coming about the time her new volume of poems was published by the Hub City Writing Project in Spartanburg. "Noticing Eden" has a South Carolina theme, and a cover by Gullah artist Jonathan Green, a native of Beaufort County.

The poet laureate's duties include speaking around the state. Wentworth will join Lowcountry novelist Josephine Humphreys on Thursday, addressing "The Lure of the Lowcountry" in the Meet the Author series at Sun City Hilton Head. She works that in with family and job responsibilities, and her classes at a Charleston hospital, where she teaches poetry as a form of healing.

Sometimes our poet laureate hears whispers that she ain't from around here.

But her life in the Lowcountry is more typical than it is odd. Most of us ain't from around here anymore.

We're not planter barons. We're more like the osprey, that singular, familiar image that soars through "The World is Green Again," which Wentworth read before a hushed crowd of thousands Wednesday.

He exists as a mass of feathers, talons, and bone -- a dark winged fishhawk weaving a life from air.