From Topsail to Southport, writer rails against local overdevelopment through poetry
Beejay Grob would be a pretty good character in a book if she weren't real.
The New Jersey native attended the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she edited the student literary magazine, Atlantis.
In a varied career, she's crewed on a tall ship, served as a deckhand on fishing boats, co-owned a shrimp boat and reported for The State Port Pilot in Southport.
"Just Off Wrightsville," her new poetry chapbook, reflects that background. The verses here drip with sense of place, almost like Robert Frost's New England poems.
She takes her readers for rides on the Cedar Island and Southport-Fort Fisher ferries, leads them into the mud flats on Eagles Island (with Stone tugboats chugging in the background), sails them out on a morning off Topsail Island and detours as far as Brookgreen Gardens.
Grob watches the sky and knows the heavens. Orion and the Big and Little Dippers float overhead, and she spots the Beehive Nebula in "The Crab" (the constellation Cancer).
Her eye is also on nature, and her sympathy as well: "Cardinals return to their dogwoods, azaleas to our yards," she writes.
She doesn't like overdevelopment: "Weapons with teeth yanked down trees/ stripped of shade, made homeless/ families of birds whenever a loblolly landed/ like booming Seneca guns on the street."
Along with the possums, raccoons and anoles, she writes, the builders drive out "the backpacked man," the homeless.
Grob swims in the modernist tradition and pulls off a haiku or two, but she's not afraid to pull off the occasional rhyme: "Down here, where even plants chomp meat/ we bottle our haints so they can't eat."
That's a side refrain from her tribute to The Bottle House at Airlie Gardens, and to the spirit of Minnie Evans, its resident artist/visionary.
Elsewhere, she'll invoke the King Neptune restaurant, the old Wit's End and a blues set with the legendary Polar Bear.
Grob is the sort of poet who can find an audience with people who think they don't like poetry.
Mott receives honor
Wilmington writer Jason Mott has received a 2024 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The Bolton native studied at Cape Fear Community College and at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in creative writing. He is currently an associate professor in UNCW's creative writing department.
In addition to two poetry collections, Mott has written four novels. His first, "The Returned," was adapted as the ABC series "Resurrection." His latest, "Hell of a Book," won the National Book Award for fiction and North Carolina's Sir Walter Raleigh Prize, among other honors.
Book review
Just Off Wrightsville
By Beejay Grob
Philadelphia: Moonstone Press, $10 paperback
This article originally appeared on Wilmington StarNews: "Just Off Wrightsville" explores Wilmington, NC through poetry
