Dear Readers,
I’m doing the final preparations for the summer WE (too) THE PEOPLE poetry series––very exciting! If you haven’t heard about that yet, a flyer will be going out shortly. So for today's Flashback Friday, here's an updated Red Letter #12 from the very outset of this evolving project, a lovely poem from Polly Brown.
Enjoy!
Steven
Flashback Friday––RLP#12
Dvorak and My Grandfather
My grandfather was six years old
when Dvorak discovered America,
but I can’t be sure
this music ever reached him.
Instead, he had the cows, wide and slow,
carrying their cargo of darkness
under a blue Maine sky;
ferns and white pines, the river;
the bride who didn’t abandon him
when all the wealth of his barns burned down
a week before their wedding. Listen:
here’s the quick-fingered mischief
of their sons. Maybe the cello is what we take
from love into the city, to help us
breathe there. Or maybe the sorrows
that made him weep and look away, every goodbye,
could have been soothed by the sound
in the night, later, of a cello.
-- Polly Brown
Reading Polly Brown’s poems, I find a more permeable membrane between human nature and the natural world than is common in contemporary writing. Goat, goose, barn swallow; apple, catalpa, spruce––they each share the spotlight in her poems like much-loved family members, and are just as astutely observed. And grandparent, parent, child, grandchild seem to be elemental parts of the landscape, entwined with all that green urgency––and subject to sun, rain and all the varieties of mortal weather. But the effect of Polly’s approach is often a remarkable sense of at-homeness in the world, a feeling many of us will realize we’ve forgotten somewhere along the way into adulthood. And thus the poems comfort even as they challenge.
I love how clear-eyed observation, sly and alluring, morphs into something akin to mystery. Those cows, “wide and slow,/ carrying their cargo of darkness”, alert us to something just beyond the powers of perception. When “all the wealth of his barns burned down”––a week before what should have been life’s happiest day––and still the bride-to-be remains loyal––I felt the spirit of Thomas Hardy inspecting this family drama. But then there is music, poetry, which erupt in our lives unexpectedly, and bring with them an almost anomalous sense of peace. After reading the headlines in today’s Boston Globe, I could use a little of that soothing cello, and I’m sure I’m not alone in this.
After two lovely chapbooks, Polly published a full-length collection––Pebble Leaf Feather Knife (Cherry Grove Collections) back in 2019––and where this poem eventually appeared. I am happy to report that a brand-new collection, Stitching, will be released in 2025 by Every Other Thursday Press. Polly has received awards from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the Worcester County Poetry Association. A lifelong writer and educator––each skill nurturing the other––Polly moved back to her mother’s farmhouse in New Sharon, Maine, a place where many generations of her family had rooted their lives. The voices embedded in that landscape––as well as the ones they prompt from Polly’s own imagination––continue to make their regular visits to her notebook.
Red Letters 3.0
* If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to:
steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com
* To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:
https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices
and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene
http://dougholder.blogspot.com
* For updates and announcements about Red Letter projects and poetry readings, please follow me on BlueSky
@stevenratiner.bsky.social
and on Twitter
@StevenRatiner
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