Happy Poetry Month: Two Superb new Vermont Collections
I often ask myself if depression is circumstantial or anatomical. Although it runs deep in my family, current events certainly play a role, and I know I’m not alone. But which is it? Both?
I turn to three resources for relief. One is simply acknowledging my own powerlessness. Another is escaping into the natural world of woods and water, and a third is immersing myself in beauty.
Two recent collections of poetry have lifted my flagging spirits, reminding me again of the solace found in beauty.
Angela Patten’s most recent collection of poems “Feeding the Wild Rabbit” deserves your time and attention. Captive of both her passion for the language, the innate lyricism of poetry, all seeped through the filter of a Catholic upbringing in her native Ireland, her work is a celebration of her love of words, birds, and her coming-of-age memories.
Like an illuminated manuscript, the opening poem enlightens uncommon words: “clavichord, clavicle, tangent, serpentine, sin, and venial” — the meaning and sound of each, a small epiphany.
Patten’s migration from the moral rigors of Catholicism to the freedom of agnosticism reminds us how we never fully escape our religious upbringings.
“Yet even now in foreign cities, lacking one iota of religious belief, I visit churches to light white votive candles, pay homage to their long hard labor and remember their romantic souls, their spirit-shone servitude.”
Like all great poetry, Patten’s work emerges from her life experiences, a panorama of joy and pain. But unlike many poets, Patten is able to revisit these memories without false packaging or delusion and shares them with us openly and even occasionally with sly humor.
In “Why I Would Like to Be a River,” Patten’s self-knowledge and clairvoyance shine out:
Because it begins as a whisper
in a lonely place high up
among the bracken and the sedges,
unnoticed, trivial.
At first slender as a girl
collecting sallies in her apron,
a river swells with rainfall,
shrinks with drought,
may slacken to a stingy trickle
or strengthen to a torrent.
Reed buntings skim its surface.
An emerald dragonfly and kingfisher
flit and dazzle above its banks.
Its voice is never jabber, only song.
A river may appear impressionable,
Foolish, easily led. And yet,
if turned aside, will in the end
come round to its intended course.
It cannot be contained by fences,
ditches, levees, dams. Leaves
everything it has ever owned
behind it in the past.
It runs its own way home, holding
a kiss in its watery mouth.
Her ability to see and convey to us her readers the trajectory of her own sensual emergence as a young woman as described in the meanderings of an upland river gaining mass and torrent, we experience her skill as an observer of her life and her ability to convey this within the limitation of words. We come to see ourselves through the window of her lyricism.
If, like me, you’re too easily mired in the quotidian darkness of the day, give yourself a gift and read this beautiful collection by Angela Patten.
In the second new poetry release, Scudder Parker immerses us in his life in Vermont. In a forenote to the reader, he writes, “I reflect on early family life, a first career as Protestant preacher, midlife changes, evolving relationships, and a longing to find intimacy with the mystery and specificity of this world.” After which he urges us to read the book sequentially. I followed his advice and was rewarded. Few poetry collections ask this of us, but in the case of this remarkable life trajectory, his advice is well taken.
The riverine theme meanders through several generations of Parker’s life in Vermont.
Going Back
Our childhood brook crept through
Hummocked marshes dove under
Canopies of roots paused and pooled
by granite boulders thrilled me
with speckled many colored trout.
I captured their sleek elusive bodies.
Bu they flourished in that trickle
almost to the first of spring – welling
With its liquid song of leaving.
I knew every riffle pool from
that spring to the Burroughs Road
and for a few years every change
the seasons or the beaver wrought.
At North Danville School when we
sang about the land of the free
I knew this was what they meant
hours to feel the water in my shoes –
still home for chores by three.
Scudder Parker’s new collection of prose and verse poems is among the best I’ve ever read about Vermont. Like a series of modest tributaries flowing into a river of practical, cultural, and spiritual exposition, it buoys our understanding through several generations of life in rural Vermont and, more broadly, our finite time on earth.
The “Poem of the World” ranks for me alongside Robert Frost. It will be my gift to my dearest friends.
- Bill Schubart, author of Lila & Theron
