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Piety within shades of pantheism—that is clearly one way to look at Paula Bohince’s Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods. Bohince is, however, more naturalist than romantic, meaning that her poems above all honor their dark side, their realism, their edge. These are country matters here, incidents in the male American tradition of Frost, Sherwood Anderson, and James Wright, a fact of gender that not only distinguishes this poet’s pastoral concerns but separates their power. —Stanley Plumly
In exploring the “drift between the missing and the dead,” Paula Bohince carves beauty from the harsh complexities of suffering and survival, the chronic hardships and traumatic incidents woven into the narratives of family and place. Bound uneasily at times to human experience, animal consciousness is also a vital part of Bohince’s reckoning; even a sheep in its “comprehensible world of straw” and the “approximate bones of a field mouse” warrant her attention—and ours. Skillfully rendered, Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods is a remarkable debut. —Claudia Emerson Paula Bohince writes from the intersection of the human and natural worlds—and she cannot afford to be sentimental about either. Free of decoration and gimmick, these are poems born of urgency and honesty: their truths are hard-won, and deeply instructive. Hers is a clear-sighted tenderness born of living fully and deeply in our complex, worn, and beautiful world. —Jane Mead
Paula Bohince’s debut collection, Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods, begins with a speaker invoking her dead father, and unfolds as a kind of mystery novel. Spanning decades, and set on a decrepit, inherited farm in Pennsylvania, the daughter and father navigate the poverty of their environment and their own troubled relationship. Details of the father’s murder are gradually uncovered, and we eventually learn that he was killed by a trusted laborer. The speaker lives with this violence, on the farm as an adult, while contending with her own fears, the fallibility of memory, and the voices of ancestors who once occupied this homestead.
Bohince has the essential gifts of inventive metaphor and grace with language. But in her case these gifts infuse the poetry with a kind of New Testament glow–the poems see manifestations of innocence and evil as they are, and take note of their sad enmeshment in each of us. The light her poems cast does not prettify the ugly and the unjust. She writes clear-eyed laments for the abandoned and broken and discarded in the human and animal worlds, but she writes from the other side of despair. And, finally, we are lifted and carried through all notions of good and evil, on a wave of redemptive music.
Paula Bohince grew up in rural Pennsylvania. Her poems appear widely in such publications as Agni, Ploughshares, Slate, Southwest Review, and The Yale Review. She has been the recipient of the “Discovery”/The Nation Award, the Grolier Poetry Prize, residencies from the MacDowell Colony, and artist’s grants from the Puffin Foundation and the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation. She has taught at New York University, the New School, and elsewhere and was the University of Mississippi’s inaugural Summer Poet-in-Residence. In 2008, she will be the Amy Clampitt Resident Fellow in Lenox, Massachusetts. She holds an MFA from New York University and lives in Pennsylvania.
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