Poetry Readers Challenge discussion

I've been wanting to read more of Isabella Gardner's work for years and when buying other more necessary items this fall, I finally bought her collected poems. My interest in her was based on two poems I'd read in an anthology, probably some time in the 1990s. One of the poems, "The Milkman," portrays a quiet scene drenched with drama by word choice:

.... At last he mounted
my backstairs, climbed to the top, and there he stood still
outside the bolted door. The sun's color fainted.
I felt the horror of his quiet melt me, steal
into my sockets, and seduce me to him from
my dinner. His hand clung round the latch like rubber.
I felt him ooze against the screen and shake the frame.
I had to slide the bolt; and thus I was the robber
of my porch. Breathing smiling shape of fright ...

The entire poem can be read here (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetr...) where it appeared in the April 1952 edition of Poetry magazine.

The other poem was a Hopkinsesque riot of wordplay, sound and sense called "Summers Ago" and dedicated to Edith Sitwell. It begins:

Children I told you I tell you our sun was a hail of gold!
I say that sun stoned, that sun stormed our tranquil, our blue bay
bellsweet saltfresh water (bluer than tongue-can-tell, daughter)

The full text can be read here on page 4 of the Summer 1956 edition of the Beloit Poetry Journal (http://www.bpj.org/PDF/V06N4.pdf).

I love Hopkins and I love when more contemporary poets adeptly employ alliteration and internal rhyme. Gardner does so often in her work up to 1965. Here are the last two lines of "A Loud Song, Mother":

Sons, may you starve the maggot fears that ate our spirit's meat
and stride with brother strangers in your seven-league bare feet.

And this from the middle of "Of Flesh and Bone":

I said to them I am a girl of flesh and bone, my shift's no shroud
and d-e-a-t-h is the word I do not say aloud.
...
I vowed that eyeless earless loinless lonely
I would refuse to die; that even if only
one sense was left of me, touch or smell or taste,
I would choose to live; that in a sewer of waste
a thicket of pain a mountain of fear or the sea-
wrack of sorrow I would beg, steal, betray to be.

She engaged in this loaded language for about ten years and then dropped it. Her language became comparatively plain. In this collected volume, there are only three poems to represent her 1965 volume and she ceased publishing (at the request of her husband, poet Allen Tate, according to the summary of a biography: Not at All What One Is Used To: The Life and Times of Isabella Gardner) for 15 years.

I began this collection excited but by the end I felt sad for what was lost and wondered what had dampened her powers. According to the biography, it was alcoholism as well as Tate.

I finished the book shortly before heading to a family gathering that kept me away from home for a few days. When I came back and looked again at the less sound-enlivened poems, I found they still had much to offer and was a little less mournful. Here is the first stanza of the sestina "Music Room" from her final book (1980):

You must never unlock the cedar closet
Nor open the white doors to the music room
To be stared at by the french windows and drained
Flabby by the sucking mouths of pastel plants
Unseasonably bred, denatured, deformed.
There in the corner stands the piano . . .

I intend to read the entire Collected Poems again and mark the poems I most enjoy. Though they will be more concentrated in the early work, I'm sure I'll be marking throughout.

More of her poems are available on her Poetry Foundation page: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/i...

I want to add that the link to the 1956 Beloit Poetry Journal in the review above includes the entire journal and it contains such notables as John Logan, James Dickey, Louis Simpson (spelled incorrectly in the table of contents but correctly on the poem's page itself), David Ignatow, and Adrienne Cecile Rich (as she is billed in it). It also has "A NOTE on Younger Poets" worth reading right after the table of contents. I love these sorts of finds. :)

Thanks Jen. Somehow I'd never read her and I agree that her word choices make the poems vibrant and thrumming. Even the one you noted as less exciting had good wording: "Flabby by the sucking mouths of pastel plants / Unseasonably bred, denatured, deformed."
I like the energy of her work. Thanks for the introduction.

I think she is easier to miss than to find. Her short initial publication career and then long disappearance made her a marginal, rarely anthologized poet. It was just luck on my part that I happened to come across a couple of poems that were, which I photocopied.

Ah another long-lost female poet and how sad that she ceased publishing. It rather put me off Allen Tate. Your review bringing her back into the light had me wanting to read more of her poems, and to find out more about her.

Indeed, Caroline. Yet another anthology we'll eventually have to put together: The Lost Women.