Every Speck: The Mythology of a Southern Poet, A Memoir in Poetry and Prose 

By Bonnie Roberts  

Archway Publishing, 2025  

Paper $30.99, E-Book $3.99  

Mixed Genre: Memoir, Poetry  

Reviewed by Harry Moore 

Cover of EVERY SPECK by Bonnie Roberts. Cover shows an image of the head and torso of a white horse on a dark blue background.

Henry James advised young writers, “Be one on whom nothing is lost.” Distinguished poet, teacher, publisher, and mentor Bonnie Roberts is not young—in her seventies—but her memoir Every Speck: The Mythology of a Southern Poet models a life of sustained attention and deep memory. In a kind of tag match between nimble and lucid prose and poetry that sings and weeps, she explores her rich and complex past.  

There are ample facts—along with a selection of well-placed black-and-white photos—and a broad chronological structure: “Things Fall Apart,” “Who We Were Before,” “Who We Became,” and “More Healing, More Pain.” And the facts are important—childhood, parents, Good Grandmother and Mean Grandmother, uncles, aunts, cousins, the little house on the hill, the big house by the lake, flying egrets and the larger natural world, the bus ride to Auburn, marriage, a daughter, divorce, and, above all else, the terror-inducing and life-dominating night when Roberts, at age 13, walked into the room where her brilliant but mentally ill sister had used a shotgun to end her life.  

As indispensable as they are, however, for Roberts, facts are raw materials, vehicles for deep, joyful, sometimes excruciating lived experience, for “being” amid the chaos of existence. Long before “mindfulness” was a mantra in artistic and self-help circles, Roberts absorbed the stuff of life around her, opening herself to see and taste and feel it all, to find in it “a promise of everlasting summer.” In such a life, time bends back on itself, past is always present—a moment of “drinking” honeysuckle blooms with her daughter bringing back, with exquisite poignancy, the same experience with her sister years before; a time of eating pears in a tree with her sister now forever “frozen in her heart.” Time, of course, moves inexorably, but for Roberts, as for Thoreau, it is “but the stream [she goes] fishing in.”  

And what Roberts pulls from pain, grief, anger, betrayal, joy, bliss, and despair are what she calls “moments of grace”: sitting in a chapel in Beauvais, France; feeding a gaunt stray cat in Turkey; wading in the sea with her husband and daughter in St. Joseph’s Bay; pulling a dripping cold coke from the drink box at the country store with her father. Such moments are restorative; they are “bliss.” Like Wordsworth’s “spots of time,” they “retain / a renovating virtue” whereby “the mind is nourished and invisibly repaired.” Mysterious and beyond our control, these moments are the ineffable source of healing and hope.  

The greatest challenge to hope for Roberts, and the deepest unifying force in her story, is the quest for redemption after her sister’s suicide—the haunting memory of running out into the icy December cold; the guilty sense that, even as a child, she might have gotten the ambulance there sooner; the excruciating loneliness and sense of estrangement as her parents lock down in their own bitter grief; the implicit catharsis and clarity produced by writing; the hard-earned liberation found through endurance, love, mercy, and forgiveness.  

Mixed genres do vital work in Every Speck. Prose passages give needed structure and exposition, and poems—from daresome celebrations to profound laments—sing (and sometimes dance) along the way. Though one might wish the section beginning “More Healing, More Pain” not quite so long, the account of Roberts’ “dying” for several minutes in 2001 and the “Lazarus” poem that follows are deeply moving. Here, too, amid reflections in the manner of Pascal’s Pensées, are episodes of deeply felt experience.  

The language of Every Speck is imaginative, precise, and steeped in detail. Reading consecutively or dipping in at any point, one finds visionary and finely crafted passages that at once, in the words of Tennyson’s Ulysses, “drink life to the lees,” affirm the supreme value of the examined life, and demonstrate the redeeming power of love, grace, beauty, and art. The world is richer for this powerful memoir.  

 

Retired after teaching English in Alabama community colleges for four decades, Harry Moore is the author of seven poetry books, most recently We the People: Confessions of a Caucasian Southerner from Broadstone Books, winner of the Alabama State Poetry Society Book of the Year award. He lives with his wife, Cassandra, in Decatur, Alabama. Website: harryvmoore.com.