Writers Who Teach, Teachers Who Write
OPPOSITE Faith Shearin and Thomas J. Murdock during their high school years together and RIGHT on their wedding day in
Duck, NC, 1984
I was asked to tabulate a number based on a life stress inventory and you know how bad I am at math; I thought of your father drawing a circle on the chalkboard of our high school geometry class, his hand like dust. I received 100 points because you died and another 28 because our daughter started college, 20 for our new apartment, 30 because I have trouble sleeping and eating. I remembered you at 24: your age when we promised till death do us part; your life was already half over when you danced with me beneath white balloons; I have been counting those balloons in our album of wedding photographs where they drift out the door of the reception hall into a cypress forest heavy with moss. You were 30 when our daughter was born, and she was 18 when you died at 48, and your father would have said all of these are even numbers: divisible by 2 with no remainder. COURTESY OF FAITH SHEARIN
in “Babel” tells her dead husband, “I search for / the language I can speak with you,” she remains committed to articulating not only human vulnerability and sorrow but also humanity’s resilience, its capacity to surmount the gravest loss. “Let Us Mourn like the Victorians” employs marked hyperbole to warn poet and reader alike to resist self-abandonment to grief, while the book’s penultimate poem, “Listening to Beethoven’s Ninth the Summer after You Died,” refers to this symphony as the composer’s “anthem to humanity,” containing as it does Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” inspired by Schiller’s poem of the same title. Shearin’s reference to Beethoven’s last complete symphony is one of her book’s many allusions and historical references that enrich its portrait of loss, extending that portrait beyond the personal to the archetypal and universal. Plunged suddenly into widowhood, the poet recognizes in “Glass Piano” that “the language of widows . . . is diluvian.” She likewise emphasizes the ancient roots of grief in her rather unwieldy title “Poem in Which I Make a Cave Painting of Our Life Together,” a poem that includes the poignant line, “I am mixing my paint with ash.” Shearin draws from fairy tale, history, and myth for images of love and marriage, mortality and abandonment and longing: the lost Gretel, the dancing plague of 1518, sailors shipwrecked in “the graveyard of the Atlantic,” marooned aviator Amelia Earhart, Isis’s piecing together and resurrecting of Osiris, Psyche’s fraught marriage to Cupid, Odysseus’s visit to the Underworld, the Gaelic harvest festival of Samhain, when “the boundaries between this world / and the Otherworld opened” (in “The Day of the Dead”), a festival whose dates nearly coincide with the dates of Shearin’s husband’s heart attack (October 31) and death (November 2). Through such references the poet enlarges the scope of her vision, reminding readers of our temporal–and all too temporary–existence, encouraging us to embrace love and human connection as antidotes to the ravages of time. Lest readers assume, incorrectly, that Shearin’s poems are overly allusive, let me hasten to stress the clarity and directness of most of her writing. Perhaps the book’s second poem, “Math,” written in the two-line stanzas she favors in nearly half the collection’s poems, will illustrate:
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