Traveling the River
by Hope Whitby
Growing up in rural, southern Virginia, Hope Whitby planted marigolds in the garden with her mother, canoed the Nottoway River with her father, and waited for the bookmobile on the porch with her sisters Vicky and Kelly. Her debut poetry collection captures with great intimacy and warmth a girlhood immersed in the natural world, and a poet’s coming of age. Traveling the River is a book about strong roots, new beginnings, and the timeless redemptive power of art and nature. “Give my words seed,” Whitby writes, “and they will take root.”
“As serious as a heart attack, as tender as love’s flutters in the chest or a chihuahua’s first trembling bath, the vital core of this book is haiku. In Hope Whitby’s hands (as Mary Oliver has said in another context), the form is “a doorway into thanks.” Sometimes an anecdotalist, sometimes a local colorist, Whitby is more often a manifestation of Imagism come again. She can show you a seven-year-old “peek[ing] around hips” or can make you breathe in “the cedar [of Hemingway’s] suit coat.” Here’s a new poet, a poet on her way to “a new moon [that] still shines.”
—Ron Smith, author of The Humility of the Brutes, Poet Laureate of Virginia 2014-2016
