Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006

by Ellen Bryant Voigt

“Genius. Voigt is a poet of knowledge, and knowledge in the living, messy world.”―Robert Pinsky, Washington Post Book World To witness the maturation of a poet over time is one of the great pleasures of reading. Here Ellen Bryant Voigt gives us that narrative distilled and amplified, arranging selections from six previous volumes to culminate in transcendent recent poems.

Genres: Poetry

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 29, 2007

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 3 out of 5]

That all this happened far away from you;
that the verb “think” is stupid and unworthy;
that when all this began, the world went away;
that what we thought the world was, was a dream;
that you, the hub of that world, belong to the dream;
that you, remembered, now must be imagined;
that imagining is how we think we choose;
that the verb “choose” is stupid and unworthy;
that need, unspeakable need, is what imagines
while joy or grief, rage or terror dreams;
that there is no world except the worlds we dream;

[Peycho Kanev · Rating 4 out of 5]

MESSENGER

1.

First I smelled it, hovering near the bed:
distinctly saline, as in a ship’s wake;
a bit of dust and mold, like moth-found fur;
also something grassy, crushed herb, sharper.
After that, when they turned the ward lights out,
the space ship glowing at the nurses’ hub,
his pod stilled and darkened, only the small
digitals updating on the screen,
then I could see—one “sees” in deep gloaming,
though ground-fog makes an airless, formless room—
how fully it loomed behind and larger than
the steel stalk, the sweet translucent fruit.
One doesn’t notice wings when they’re at rest.
One doesn’t notice the scythe of the beak at rest:
opaque, like horn, or bone, knobbed at the base
but tapering, proportionate to the head.
In Quattrocento paintings, Mary’s face
is mirrored by the messenger’s radiant face:
that’s meant to comfort—see, they’re just like us.
No, they’re not like us. This had no face,
and its posture was a suspect courtesy,
stolen from a courtier who nods
to the aging king, head bowed, and holds aside,
lowered, but unsheathed, the sword.

2.

Except in wired emergencies, the signals
sounding for a pressure drop but not
a fever spike, a bad white count, blood
transfused too fast, a tube dislodged, sudden
struggle to breathe, the opiates late again,
always late—it was my task to harry
the Duty-Nurse, Charge-Nurse, Intern, Attending,
to put in the rut of their path implacable me—
the workers came and went without alarm
and thus I could not trust them—
they must think it
part of the common furniture that clutters
cardio-thoracic post-surgical wards,
but I think not: I think your father’s code
was branded somewhere on its bony leg,
631688, the same sign
stamped on the band clamped to the swollen wrist,
markers for an arduous migration.
I think it was used to hunger. I think it was waiting
for me to leave the room.

[Fredore Praltsa]

I love how carefully she layers meaning. For example, in the poem "The Trust," the single use of the word "husbandry" turns a narrative about a dog killing the neighbor's sheep into a parable for human infidelity. There's far more where that came from. Reading my first Voigt poem in high school ("Jug Brook") kind of turned me on to the whole enterprise of poetry because of this very layering of meaning (I had a very good English teacher—Maura, if you're reading this, <3). The subtlety that Voigt creates with her layering allows us to discover things alongside her, which makes everything far more exciting (and often creepy). That doesn't mean all her poems are devoid of explicit arguments. For example, she says "I thought how the young / are truly boring, unvaried as they are / by the deep scar of doubt, the constant afterimage / of regret" (ugh). It just means that explicit arguments are rarely the climax of her poems; instead, they are introduced obliquely (the "I thought" does a lot of work in the prior quote) and come as a part of a far more complicated whole.

Her poetry's worldview definitely tends toward the bleaker side, sometimes almost comically so (though she's always, I think, being dead serious). See this part of "Long Marriage":

during those marathons
between wars, our vivid
Dark Times, each dancer holds

the other up so he,
as the vertical heap barely
moves yet moves, or she,

eyes half-lidded, unmoored,
can rest. Why these, surviving
a decimated field?

Try reading THAT at a wedding.

But the book also offers a sort of stark comfort, coming partly from faith and partly from a refusal to romanticize or ignore disenchantment and suffering. People who question whether the world has given them what they were made to expect it would give them will find a friend in her.

[Jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Messenger

4

That all this happened far away from you;
that the verb “think” is stupid and unworthy;
that when all this began, the world went away;
that what we thought the world was, was a dream;
that you, the hub of that world, belong to the dream;
that you, remembered, must now be imagined;
that imagining is how we think we choose;
that the verb “choose” is stupid and unworthy;
that need, unspeakable need, is what imagines
while joy or grief, rage or terror dreams;
that there is no world except the worlds we dream;
that while I imagine you you’re dreaming us;
that in the dream you dream your father rises.

[Emmaline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, Ellen Bryant Voigt is SO GOOD. I keep hearing her described as a "disciplined" poet, which is just the right word--so precise, so vivid, and restrained in the way that true master craftspeople are. My favorites were the influenza ones... obviously.

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really gorgeous, accessible poetry with lengthy considerations of the natural world, rural life, and grief.

[Fungus Gnat · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am not much of a poetry reader, and particularly contemporary poetry. I’ve read Ashbery and a little Hass—that’s about it, as far as books are concerned. So I don’t have much to go on for comparison, but I kinda liked a lot of Voigt’s poetry. Although it’s almost entirely without regular rhythm (I don’t see many pentameters), it’s still recognizable to this nonspecialist as poetry. Most of Voigt’s poems are lyrical, reflective pieces a page or a few pages long, or divided into sections of that length. They seem mostly to emanate from a country life, a farm life, with some focus on illness. In “Snakeskin,” she uses molting as a metaphor for sleep and renewal. In “Blue Ridge,” she watches fireworks with a male companion with whom she feels no connection. “Soft Cloud Passing” is one of several that address the fear of losing a sick child. In “Winter Field” she has fallen into icy water. In “Prayer,” she gives birth. These are some of my favorites. There are numerous others I liked. Many of them seem to grow from and elaborate upon the mundane. I can’t really say more about them, because my poor attempts at paraphrase would compromise their attraction, which is largely in their reticence or ambiguity of allusion. Not surprisingly—poetry being almost inherently hit or miss—I found at least as many of Voigt’s poems kinda flat or obscure. Even her good poems usually require a bit of thought and rereading, which is fine, but some others did not seem to me to repay the effort. The poems from the second collection, The Forces of Plenty, generally struck me that way. And Kyrie, the book-length cycle of poems that reflects on World War I and the flu epidemic of 1918, includes sections I like quite a bit, but those written in the form of letters home do nothing for me. Overall, though, for her terse imagery, for her investment of self, and for her quiet rhetoric, which can often be lively enough to leave a little mordant surprise at the end a poem, I’ll return to some of these, and am likely to memorize one or two.

[Kitty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incisive writing -- the kind of poems which draw depth from the ordinary, from music, image, nature, story.
What are our gestures? How do we see? What is it we expect from our words?

I have the sense of a well-read philosopher crafting intricate jewelry strung on a necklace.

In her 1987 The Lotus Flower, the epigram is:
Man is in love, and loves what vanishes—W.B. Yeats

What is it that we love, that makes us weep when it is in front of us (as in the man in Variation: Two Trees),
and weep when it is gone?

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best collected poems I've read in an awfully long time. Her range is wide and deep, and the poetic depictions of rural life on the farm are lush and memorable. A master at her finest in this collection.

[Shayla · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had the privilege of meeting Ellen at Breadloaf this past summer. Her poetry is vivid, intense, and beautiful. She has quickly become one of my favorite poets!

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wish she had a sense of humour-very well crafted, most in a very serious mode

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stunningly lucid and moving poems.