Abigail Thomas: Good Evening & Other Poems From Long Ago
by Jane Edberg
Abigail Thomas is one of my favorite authors. I admire her ability to say so much with so few words, be straightforward, simple, and often bring humor to an ordinary thing or event. Her poems do the same.
I recently contacted Abigail and asked her if she had any poems she’d like to share in our journal. To my delight, she said yes, she had some. Not long after, I received a small book of poems in the mail, titled Good Evening & Other Poems, published by Penumbra Press, 44 years ago in 1979. This beautiful little book was created on an old school printing press using Palatino types on dampened Curtis Rag paper. The book cover is embossed and there are drawings in umber ink by printmaker, artist Eleanor Simmons. On a back inside page, I found the number 203 handwritten in red ink, depicting this as one in an edition of 250. Elegant and rare. On the dedication page I read: for my family. Beneath that type, a signature in black ink: Abigail Luttinger.
Abigail had tucked a postcard into the book and on it she wrote that the poems were all written in the 60s and 70s and that her second husband’s name was Quin Luttinger, hence her signature. A lovely mini-history lesson which I much appreciated. She later wrote to me and referred to her younger self as a different woman, a version of herself, a familiar stranger. When my grandmother was eighty, she said to me, “You’ll be a million people in your lifetime.” After living for almost seven decades, that rings true for me. Abigail has confirmed it. And although she was Mrs. Luttinger at the time she wrote those poems, you’ll find the Abigail Thomas you know brilliantly inside each one.
From Abigail’s former self, I am thrilled to present a poem a week, every Wednesday, for the next twenty weeks, starting June 28th.
Let’s start with her most recently published poem: “Written on my 40th Birthday, 1981,” from her new memoir titled, Still Life at Eighty: the next interesting thing, Golden Notebook Press, 2023.
Written on My 40th Birthday, 1981
by Abigail Thomas (published here with permission from the author)
When I am old and fat and gray
all shoulder, rump and ribcage
unable to move any more than this tub
can, I trust someone will hunch
over me with a blue sponge
and attend to my surface as I
am attending to the streaky outside
of this tub, this substantial curvaceous
unerotic old mother of a tub
and not fuss at me, or ask me
what my memories are, not expect me
to smile or sigh, because I will be
beyond all that, I will have earned
the right to keep still, not murmur
endearments unless they are part
of the job, part of the rhythm
of that work (good old girl,
you are a good old girl)
and if this sprucing up is ritual
so much the better, since I
have always been just surface
everything I know I have always known
first with my skin. And when
company is coming and you want
to look your best, battered is noble,
and worn out and beat up
and still able to hold water is honorable
Abigail Thomas, the daughter of renowned science writer Lewis Thomas (The Lives of a Cell), is the mother of four children and the grandmother of twelve. Her academic education stopped when, pregnant with her oldest daughter, she was asked to leave Bryn Mawr during her first year. She’s lived most of her life on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and was for a time a book editor and for another time a book agent. Then she started writing for publication. Her first three books “Getting Over Tom,” “An Actual Life,” and “Herb’s Pajamas” were works of fiction. Her memoir, “A Three Dog Life,” was named one of the best books of 2006 by the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. It won the 2006 Inspirational Memoir Award given by Books for A Better Life. She is also author of “Safekeeping,” a memoir, and “Thinking About Memoir,” and “What Comes Next and How to Like It” was published by Scribner in 2014. Her new book “Still Life at Eighty: the next interesting thing, is out from Golden Notebook Press, 2023.
Some of her poems in this collection previously appeared in the following publications: Chowder Review, Gravida, Hanging Loose, Kayak, Madrona, Moving Out, The Nation, The Paris Review, Poetry Now, The Titmouse Review, Wind.
