by Ellen Bryant Voigt
W.W. Norton 2007
Reviewed by John Deming
And What to Remember
Poet looks at birdfeeder and writes about the birds that feed there. Sentimental, tacky, tree-hugging swill, yeah?
Yeah, in the hands of most nature-nurturing poets.
But where lesser major label metrists transform the inevitable mysteries that come with engaging nature into woe-is-me pathos and desperation, Ellen Bryant Voigt keeps it smart. More importantly, she doesn’t mistake mystery for hopelessness. The poet suffers on the page, sure, but her “suffering” is no more or less significant than the world that surrounds the very body and mind she suffers with. When one thing suffers, all things suffer; when one thing is satisfied, all things are satisfied—and such is the inevitable, paradoxical flux of every instant.
Messenger: New and Selected Poems, which covers the last 30 years of Voigt’s career, reminds us Voigt is not terrified by—or is perhaps intelligently terrified by—these mysteries; they arrive flush with the natural world.
In that natural world, of course, are beauty, suffering, loss and the flawlessly brutal passage of time as it relates to the undoing of most people and relationships. But it would be simplistic to dwell on these without offering equal gravity to “one wild turkey, more a meal than a bird” that makes an appearance in “The Feeder” (the first poem in the book’s final section, “Messenger: New Poems”). Or the fact that our poet would have missed “multiple, tufted” birds in a nearby crabapple tree if she had been “looking the other way.”
Voigt is often seduced by, and seduces her readers with, a sense of otherness; if she hadn’t seen these birds, she never would have known the difference; likewise, it’s impossible to know what she “missed” by looking at the crabapple tree rather than the feeder. In Thoreau’s words, “the universe is wider than your view of it.”
Voigt responds with careful observation of that which she can see; she then splices it with the horror/beauty of unknowing, and leaves it alone. Yet as keen a watcher as Voigt is, she is careful never to separate herself from the mystery; there’s always the sense she is equally a part of this sense of otherness—and that mystery is the only place to settle.
It’s this kind of sensibility that makes her nature-ish poems pleasant and her elegiac poems excellent. “Practice,” one of the best poems she’s written, concludes the (somewhat disappointing) selection of poems from her best book, Shadow of Heaven. She asks, in the beginning—elegiac mood in full effect—if living life as it twitches by is “merely practice” for something other. Next comes the all-important natural image:
five bronze beetles
stacked liked spoons in one
peony blossom, drugged by lust:
if I came back as a bird
I’d remember that—
Five beetles having sex at the same time in the middle of an elegiac poem; and how dumb, how sad, how pathetic, how intuitive, how clueless and pretty and funny and memorable were all the living things on this planet. What’s great about Voigt is that she’ll propose answers to the unanswerable; coming back as a bird makes as much sense as anything else.
Inevitably there are things about the New and Selected that fall short. Like any poet, she has some books that are better than others; yet there’s an oddly even distribution to Messenger. It is pleasant to watch Voigt mature, but some of the earlier poems could’ve been dropped and replaced with some later ones, event some later series that were left out of this collection. One disposable poem is “The Letter”; the third-person narrator concludes, “If only she were rock, tree, clear water.” By the end, the better poems are just that elemental–non-judgmental, and flush with their surroundings.
At her best, Voigt can satisfy both the stern modernist and the sun-swilling aesthete; yet despite the power of her new poems, I think I’d recommend someone by both Shadow of Heaven and Kyrie before grabbing this New and Selected.
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