For Valentine's Day: Mary Oliver and "Felicity"

Sometimes, you find love where you least expect it. 

Mary Oliver (1935-2019) is not usually considered a love poet. at least in the traditional understanding of love poetry. We might first think of Shakespeare and his sonnets, or Elizabeth Barrett Browning, or Pablo Neruda, or Edna St. Vincent Millay. One of the best-known poems by William Butler Yeats is the love poem “When You Are Old.” Or the Elizabethan poets, and the Romantics. But Mary Oliver?

 

As it turns out, yes, Mary Oliver. 

 

In Felicity: Poems, published in 2015, Oliver included several love poems. They’re not what we might call “traditional” love poems; in some of them, she backs into the love theme. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Poets and Poems: Atticus and "The Dark Between Stars"

Atticus is a name with a Greek-Latin pedigree. It means “of Attica,” the region around Athens. We would translate it as “Athenian” today. The Roman orator Cicero wrote a series of letters to a good friend named Atticus, and the letters are one of the main reasons why we know as much as we do today about the orator. Much closer to our own time, the name gained a bit of fame from the character of Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, becoming a popular name for parents to give to boys. That is, until the sequel, Go Set the Watchman, was published, in which Atticus was something less heroic. 

It also happens to be the pen name of an anonymous poet, about whom little is known. He’s described as a storyteller and author. He’s published three collections of poetry: Love Her Wild: Poems (2017), The Dark Between Stars (2018), and The Truth About Magic: Poems (2019). His author description on his books says he chooses to remain anonymous “to remind himself to always write what he feels instead of what he thinks he should feel.” He’s reported to have been born in Vancouver in British Columbia, and he “loves the ocean, the desert, whisky, and playing with words.”

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

“Invitation to Poetry” by Mihai Brinas

Twenty-five-year-old poet Mihai Brinas lives in Romania and has already published four collections of poetry, including Invitation to Poetry, his most recent. Brinas write poetry in English, and he writes about love, poetry, jealousy, imagination, the passing of time, and life. 

It’s unusual to see contemporary poets write love poems, and yet that’s what comprises a significant portion of this new collection. He considers the clumsy first stages of love, the first kiss, how a relationship develops, the depth of passion, and more. This focus on love even spills into the more general journey of life poems he includes. There is something innately appealing, and rather refreshing, about a poet writing on love – the theme poets have written about for millennia. 

All of his poems are written in lower case and without punctuation. He uses line breaks to provide order and coherence. This suggests a kind of humility – something else not usually associated with contemporary poets. He writes with a crispness and simplicity that holds your attention to the words; only after do you realize that something deeper was being communicated. Consider this poem, one of the “non-love” poems in the collection.

searching for the light

have not hidden my eyes

from any sunrise

i hide my eyes

every sunset instead

i can hear the light crumble

when the night falls

i can hear it fall into pieces

that is why i avert my eyes

i am trying to collect

the remains of the light

just like a child

collecting from the dust

shards of colored glass

fantasizing they are precious stones

Mihai Brinas

This is a “life” poem, or a “searching for life” poem. The poet distinguishes between the light of sunrise, or beginnings, and the light of sunset, or endings. He’s firmly fixed on the light from the sunrise. But both kinds of light turn out to be fragmentary, and he finds himself trying to collect the remains of light in the dust, those “shards of colored glass” that he wants to believe are precious stones. And that suggests the underlying theme of the poem – is this a search for the real or for the ephemeral? The poet is an idealist here; he keeps searching because he still believes.

Brinas’ previous poetry collections are Alignment of Thoughts, Crossroads, and Thoughts That Bring Us Closer. Born and raised in Romania, he lives in the city of Arad in the western part of the country, not far from the Hungarian border.

If I had to use one word to describe Invitation to Poetry, that word would have to be enchanting. The poems have freshness and vitality. They’re fully recognizable across cultures as poems of love and life. And they remind us of what’s important and what matters.

Top photograph by Nathan McBride via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Poets and Poems: Dave Malone and “O”

My first experience with the Ozark Mountains was virtual – a novel called The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks by the late Donald Harington. It was published in 1975; I read it about 1980 and thought it hilarious. A few years later, we spent a long weekend in Branson, before it was discovered by all the big name entertainers and when Silver Dollar City at the duck boats were the bog attractions.

It was then that I learned about The Shepherd of the Hills and the Bald Knobbers, a group of vigilantes who were still fighting the Civil War for the North in the 1880s, their enemy being the Anti-Bald Knobbers, who sided with the south. I also discovered that St. Louis is considered to be in the foothills of the Ozarks, surprising, since the Ozarks about 100 miles away. And we’ve spent several long weekends at Lake of the Ozarks, created way-back-when by a dam and today a heavy tourist draw Missouri.

So my knowledge of the Ozarks was essentially limited to what any observant tourist might know. And I didn’t consider the movie Winter’s Bone to present an accurate portrayal of life in the Ozarks, either.

I’ve had a different picture of life in the Ozarks, and it’s thanks to Dave Malone’s poetry: View from the North Ten; Under the Sycamore; Seasons of Love; and Poems to Love, and the Body. His latest collection, O: Love Poems from the Ozarks, includes some of the most vivid love poetry I think I’ve read.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph by Candy Simonson via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Love Poetry After Death

This post was originally published at The Master’s Artist.

Thomas Hardy is best known for his novels – The Return of the Native was at one time required reading in many high school or college English classes. His fiction has often been described as rather dark and brooding, and sometimes as depressing, but it was clearly part of the bridge that connected the Victorians to the Moderns.

Hardy also wrote poetry, and a considerable amount of it. Some of his best known poems during his lifetime were about his wife Emma. Now, lots of poets write poems for their wives, girlfriends or lovers. What distinguishes these love poems of Hardy’s is that they were written after Emma died in 1912 – and the two were barely on speaking terms at the time of her death. She died shortly after her 72^nd birthday, which Hardy had ignored. He had not written love poetry to her before her death. He was already in love with another woman and would eventually marry her. And yet Emma’s death evoked a remarkable an outpouring of love.

“No one could have predicted the effect Emma’s death had on Hardy,” writes Claire Tomalin in the introduction to Unexpected Elegies, Poem of 1912-13 and Other Poems About Emma. “He immediately began to mourn like a lover. He had her body brought down and placed in a coffin at the foot of his bed, where it remained for three days and three nights until the funeral. And he began almost at once to write, revisiting the early love between them in his mind with an intensity that expressed itself in a series of poems.”

It was almost as if he fell in love with her after she died.

They had met in Wessex, Hardy’s “home turf” and the setting for so many of his novels. She came from a better class than he did, and both families opposed their marriage. They married anyway. Hardy published a romance novel in 1873, called A Pair of Blue Eyes, that is little known today but is partially based on their meeting and love affair. (I posted a review of it in 2012.)

Over the years, Emma helped him enormously in his writing work, but they grew apart. For the last decade of her life, they lived together under the same roof but rarely spoke.

And then she died, and Hardy seemed to fall in love with her again, or perhaps fell in love with the idea of her again. And the result was some 41 poems published form 1912 to 1920 (Hardy died in 1924).

The poems are rather simple and beautiful, the simplicity arising from profound emotion that speaks for itself. These are not lines dashed off in a fit of mourning but worked and refined and hammered into something very fine indeed. As I read Unexpected Elegies, I felt a sense of regret that at least one of these might have been read to her while she still lived. But then, they wouldn’t have been the poems they were, and are.

Here are two from the collection.

She Opened the Door

She opened the door of the West to me,

       With its loud sea-lashings,

       And cliff-side clashings

Of waters rife with revelry.

She opened the door of Romance to me,

       The door from a cell

       I had know too well,

Too long, till then, and was fain to flee.

She opened the door of a Love to me,

       That passed the wry

       World-welters by

As far as the arching blue the lea.

She opens the door of the Past to me,

       Its magic lights,

       Its heavenly heights,

When forward little is to see!

The Walk

You did not walk with me

Of late to the hill-top tree

       By the gated ways,

       As in earlier days;

       You were weak and lame,

       So you never came,

And I went alone, and I did not mind,

Not thinking of you as left behind.

I walked up there to-day

Just in the former way;

       Surveyed around

       The familiar ground

       By myself again:

       What difference, then?

Only that underlying sense

Of the look of a room on returning thence.

Photograph by Nadeeshx Jayawardana via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Dave Malone's "Under the Sycamore"

I thought love poetry was pretty much a thing of the past – you see occasional love poems today but love poetry as a genre seems to have been wrapped in acid-free paper and placed (lovingly) in a box in the attic.  If I wanted to read it, I’d have to go dust off Elizabeth Barrett Browning or some of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

And then I read Dave Malone’s Under the Sycamore.

To see my review, please visit TweetSpeak Poetry.