SECOND OPINIONS: Vesper Sparrow at Dawn
In 1982, I’d just begun adjuncting at Boston University when a friend told me about a poet named Derek Walcott, who’d also just started teaching there. I’d never heard of him, but my friend said the guy spoke brilliantly about poetry, so one Monday morning just before the class began, at 9 a.m., no less, because Walcott believed if you were willing to get up that early for poetry, you might well be serious, I knocked on his door. Walcott himself, habituated by the balmy dawn of his native St. Lucia, rose with the sun to paint and write. By 9, he’d already put in a good day’s work.
The door opened, and I stepped through it into another world. Sitting in the same classroom where Lowell had once curled over his desk, riffing on Milton before a group which then included Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and George Starbuck, it was now Derek delivering mesmerizing monlogues on Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, Auden, Braithwaite, Akhmatova, and Lorca to an intimate circle, which regularly accomodated visitors like Gertrude Schnackenberg, Rosanna Warren, and a shy bookstore clerk with a stentorian voice named Sven Birkerts. But the star of the class, clearly, was a young, sizzle-eyed poet named Melissa Green, with her frenzied hair and her impassioned staccato panegyrics on Horace’s Odes delivered, sometimes, apropos of nothing but the poet’s love of Horace.
People we knew in Boston and New York were just starting to publish. Marie Howe was writing the astonishing poems that wound up in The Good Thief. Lucie Brock Broido was transforming her appetite into our hunger. I think only Schnackenberg and Tom Sleigh had gathered themselves together between covers.
Melissa, whose father had died recently, was working on what would become the title poem to her first book, The Squanicook Eclogues. The long poem flaunted her formidable command of meter, her passion for the flora of her native New England, and her still intenser kinship with the words which gave sound and shape to what she saw, all this buoyed by an anachronistic nobility of spirit. Her verse pitched about as high as a contemporary idiom allowed… and the music was glorious: “The shadblow’s white five-petaled stars have dropped in snow./Elliptical bursts of bright green chevrons fan the air.” From the start, however, there were cries partially obscured by the dazzle of her prosody: “With every step I climb, some kinship frets/its wings inside the cupola, a wren,/or something in the house’s heart, afraid it can’t get out….” I don’t think we knew how to read her yet, her cries shielding with vigorous language the speaker’s fundamental vulnerability: “It’s me, my wings beat against the glass,/a songbird in a magpie’s nest that calls/uncertainly. All nature says lift up,/rejoice. The dead are brooding in their cowls/for blood, their eloquence is pitiless.”
None of us were surprised when Norton picked up her first book, which was celebrated by poets such as Amy Clampitt, Walcott, and Joseph Brodsky, who wrote “Here, by the grace and wisdom of the language in which ‘rhyme’ rhymes with ‘time’ comes the poet who commits everything she touches to your memory.”
Though illness enveloped her, forcing her to “go dark” for years at a stretch, the remarkable thing has been her continued evolution as a poet. Melissa understands that every life is an experiment (conducted by whom I’d rather not know), and that the writer’s task is to articulate the results, no matter how harsh. Her work charts her passage with the kind of vigilant lyricism and honesty I associate with someone like Mohammed Ali.
Fifty-Two is one of the rawest and most intense sequences I know of in American verse, evoking Hart Crane sooner than Marianne Moore. Her frankness before life’s disappointments and derailments, along with her willingness to confront directly the demon of depression which hijacked her life, drive her to develop a prosody of stinging bluntness:
Wood stove. Two desks kissing. Books. The latest in a series of sunset colored dogs.
Our tall sons, their stair-step children stamping off snow, the holiday table groaning
With our work: vegetables, poetry, merriment.
It never happened, the house, the ouevre,
The husband holding me, older. Illness married me, first and forever, put me to bed
Like a bad child. Daily, through rains quicksilver, I count an abacus of crows.
Her most recent work,The Marsh Poems, show the artist changing again, as a more philosophical voice leads her back to her earliest inspirations in the solace of the natural world. The proud and stoic bitterness has disappeared. She is once more that crystalline thing, the writer as witness:
I’ve seen a hillside burning; The Madonna of the Universe;/heard the keen, elusive aria of the red-winged blackbird//as it suddenly flicked its way to where Evy lies. I’ve seen/gulls on patrol, salt hay gleaming in the sargassos of June,//lyind down heat-struck in August, whispering with thirst./I’ve eaesdropped on the gossip of phragmites and sumac.//I’ve watched winter rain rattling the wafes out to sea, the tide/leacing its lade as an offering at my feet. I’ve been awhile away.
