Had I a Dove: Appalachian Poets on the Helene Flood

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HAD I A DOVE: APPALACHIAN POETS ON THE HELENE FLOODS
Sat, 10/17/2026 - 3:00pm
PLACE:
City Lights Bookstore
3 E Jackson St Ste 1
Sylva, NC 28779-3001
The alternative text
Join us on Saturday, October 17th at 3:00pm for a poetry reading with featured poets from the collection, Had I a Dove: Appalachian Poets on the Helene Floods.
Had I a Dove gathers the voices of over 95 poets in a moving anthology responding to the devastation of Hurricane Helene, which struck North Carolina and neighboring states in September 2024. Edited by acclaimed North Carolina poet Hilda Downer, these poems bear witness to loss, resilience, and the enduring spirit of Appalachian communities. Ranging from elegiac to hopeful, the collection is a testament to nature’s power and humanity’s ability to endure and rebuild.
The poems in Had I a Dove have a wonderful range: dire, elegiac, eulogistic, solemn, guardedly hopeful, and rooted lovingly, proudly, in the Appalachian earth. They all strike me as beautifully contemplative, prayerful. Some invoke other floods that have ravaged Appalachia over the years. Make no mistake, however: While this marvelous anthology grieves, as well it should, and necessarily tackles the trauma Helene wrought (it remains with us—physically, psychically, spiritually—though the spell of spring, and soon summer, has cloaked much of the carnage), it is not a catalogue of despair. It is not a requiem. Au contraire. Had I a Dove is rife with resilience, regeneration, vigilance, awe. These poems of witness ring with urgency, each a litany that adheres closely to Carolyn Forché’s injunction that a poem of witness is “an event and the trace of an event” that calls “for a shared sense of humanity and collective resistance,” that “its mode is evidentiary rather than representational—as evidentiary, in fact, as spilled blood.” In his essay “Can Poetry Console a Grieving Public?” Martín Espada, states: “Poems of communal grief may also … connect us with a community, either an immediate circle whose faces mirror our own, or a larger human collectivity, grounded in some essential empathy, without which none of us truly survives.”
Had I a Dove provides the necessary ritual of “communal grief” and witness to the indomitable spirit of all those extraordinary, valiant, land-tithed-and-beholden folks and their communities that well in concentric circles into the vast reaches of Appalachia. Witness permits clarity: cosmos out of chaos. Ultimately, this volume is a kind of praise song. It’s essential to “give sorrow words,” as Malcolm says to Macduff in Macbeth, lest “the grief that does not speak knits up the o’erwrought heart and bids it break.”