60
2014
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
. . . You walk back by, invisible again, you who have spotted nothing but broken shells, pearled black and amber, and this beached stranger, almost your twin, this woman staring down the sea.
Whole libraries of implication are stored in these phrases: “invisible again,” “broken shells,” “beached stranger,” “staring down.” Three words, “almost your twin,” recall irresistibly Baudelaire’s despairing apostrophe to Ennui: “mon semblable, – mon frere!”1 “Shelling, Hunting Island” is a fine, strong poem for anyone to be proud of. I would like to suggest, however, that it is a different kind of poem from “Dear Happenstance.” In “Shelling,” the subject matter would have been foreknown and the materials, including particularly the central symbol of the “beached” woman, were arranged during composition to dramatize the speaker’s moment of self-awareness. “Shelling” is less ambitious than “Happenstance”; it is an intact object, complete in itself. No other poem could have occupied the space reserved for it. 1
The last line of Charles Baudelaire’s “To the Reader” in The Flowers of Evil (1857); translated by Robert Lowell: “you – hypocrite Reader – my double – my brother!”
photograph by donna kain
the light strikes them from one angle and of their very different appearance when the angle changes. The opposed effects, light and dark, are equally valid inside the intuited space. The poem happens as an event that the space allows, or invites, to happen. Maybe I can make my distinction a little clearer by using comparisons with another poem. A number of pieces in the book deal in fairly straightforward fashion with a particular state of mind or feeling. I read “Dear Heavy Heart,” “Shelling, Hunting Island,” “Why Does Rain Cast This Longsome Spell?,” “The Tilt That Stumbles Me,” and a few others as addressing almost directly the subject of mental and emotional depression. In “Shelling, Hunting Island” the image of a woman sitting on a log by the ocean is presented in detail. She is seen as a symbol, almost as a personification, of depression. “Her thighs have each fallen away from the other, / as if emptiness is all / she can make of the morning.” Detailed description makes her as inescapable a part of the landscape as the log upon which she sits, an object of nature indifferent to the observations of the speaker. But then her significance is revealed: “She is the reason you came.” This revelation brings the speaker to some understanding of herself:
number 23
“Dear Happenstance” is the first of a sequence of thirteen poems called “Letters Lost to Wind.” The title of each of the thirteen includes the adjective “dear” and atop the pages of twelve of them are running titles, printed with brackets and ellipses. For instance, the poem, “Dear Village of Mushrooms,” is affixed with “[Dear Thicket of Brambles . . . ]” and “[Dear Fledged Hunger . . . ].” What these running titles signify, I cannot say. They may have been discarded provisional titles for “Mushrooms,” or completed poems Meyers decided not to include, or attempts at poems that did not pan out. Whatever the case, the inclusion of these titles implies the possibility of alternatives. Another poem different from “Mushrooms” might have taken its place in the field of expectancy and could have occupied the space on that page. Well, only a deluded few of us are interested in abstruse theorizing. I only want to suggest that a number of Meyers’s poems are to be read in a certain, special way. They may be complete in themselves. Most of them are. But they also permit unstated relationships to some of the others – maybe to all of them. The title of the volume is taken from the closure of “Dear Atamasco Lily”: “Dear red-stained lily. Rain lily. / Zephyr lily. Dear fairy lily. / Wild Easter lily. / My dear, dear stagger grass.” This poem begins by praising the attractive qualities of the flower: “the surprise of you / and your sweet repetition. // Your boldness . . . / . . . // your plenitude.” But “the music in above Susan Laughter Meyers with Fred Chappell at the Eastern North Carolina Literary Homecoming, Greenville, NC, 21 Sept. 2013