The dramatic imagery, heavy with the terrain and her response to it, is most reflected in the poem that won her recognition as the North Carolina Poet Laureate.

And now that a few buds appear

On the sycamore, I watch the road

Winding down this mountain

Not even a mule can clinb

Without a struggle. Long daylight

Wildwood Flower, 5-10]

The connection of the people to their land is the nature of an Appalachian soul; it is the galvanizing hum that motors generations through its tangled thicket and cold ridge. Byer knows this, feels this, and sets it alive before putting it to rest in her poetry. Through careful image choice, she joins the ranks of the southern literary elite. It is not coincidental that the great writers of the South are not known for social commentary, pink fiction, or the juvenile wandering epitomized...

It is this story that Byer tells; the story of a soul, one in a line of many, so tied to the land that gave it life, it cannot define life without it.
Byer, Kathryn Stripling. Black Shawl: Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998.

Byer, Kathryn Stripling. Catching Light: Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002.

Byer, Kathryn Stripling. Girl in the Midst of the Harvest. Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech Press, 1986.

Byer, Kathryn Stripling.

Wildwood Flower: Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

Kathryn Stripling Byer. New Georgia Encyclopedia. Literature. Available online. http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?path=/Literature/Poetry&id=h-505