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Consider “The Daze”Ethan Lewis, PhD Hugh Kenner, within reams of astute critique, has damned more with faint praise than most can boast to have cursed outright. Of H.D., he notes “Speech held down, held back;…cutting, arresting, limiting, permitting no flow.” Yet Kenner complains only in part; the very restrictions remarked likewise yield the “few but perfect images” (e.g., “Sea Rose,” “Oread,” “Heat,” “Storm,” “Evening,” “If You Will Let Me Sing”) composed in her prime. He censures D., in essence, as a one-trick Dryad – “In her average work, one is more aware of rhythmic constriction than of images.” Though his comments (unseemly as they seem) on her ex’s negative effects on style and esteem, touch truth.1 Several Siobhan Pitchford poems feature a semi-breathless reticence reminiscent of H.D.’s: Black and blue, Shadows beneath the surface Bring tension, Create strange strained flatness In voices, in glances Inside once warm bodies Curled in a ball Fists clenched, jaw tight Body rigid with fright Uncertain Of everything And Nothing In retrospect, once her rhythm operates upon the pulse, even her end-stops oft project beyond the pauses: one discerns blue shadows beneath the surface; “Curled in a ball Fists clenched” in which we likewise process Curl in a balled fist. Even at such moments when she presents spasm, she fights through it, as a runner endures a hamstring pull and finishes the race. “Fear,” “Healing,” “The Seat of Stress,” “A Time Limit to Love,” “Caught Between” and other aptly titled counterparts bear this courageous emotional signature. The movement remarked portends Ms. Pitchford’s break entire from this mood, which, sadly, circumscribed H.D. Escape is intimated in another ‘’twixt’ poem, enhanced by the flowing syllables and loosened grammar: caught between the letters images randomly skitter across the periphery of my vision plow through the half formed thoughts scatter them haphazardly until lost Chapter and verse are written by someone else. Part of the charge of “Between the Letter and the Meaning” consists in its numbering itself among the pages of that book the poem pretends went unwritten.2 Ms. Pitchford, though, did more than “think about pushing together / all the leftover words into my own / perfect binding.” The last line’s perfect participle connotes doubly about the intensity of the text and the book’s style. Though they excellently bind their content, Ms. Pitchford’s forms, like her feelings, impress as unfolding—as, again, in a dual sense, moving. Crumpled pieces, old love letters caught up in April breezes fly beyond my reach. I want to read the words written, without revealing my own emotions along with curiosity. Carelessly released missives, unintentionally thrown in to the wind, intrigue. What secrets they hold becomes an obsession, unsatisfied.
from me with only a glimpse—love’s address faded, unreadable, sparks a memory light blue paper, worn with time and my tears.
Imagination sails April breezes sets my poetry free to dance once more. The bounding run-ons (neither “Careless” nor “unintentional”) that veritably blow through this sonnet celebrate—by, “once more,” enacting what they describe—Ms. Pitchford’s emotive release. The chosen mold, moreover, plausibly points up how she skilled herself at proceeding to counterpoint constricting. With husband David, Siobhan commenced the dialogic sonnet sequence still in progress, Orpheus and Eurydice: Dialogues (on which I’ve written elsewhere). Continual practice at decasyllabics possibly conditioned her at extending the short line she still wields impressively.3 Perhaps I’ve now transgressed the frontiers of criticism proper by speculating on compositional training. In this hinterland, however, I’ll stalk a bit more, toward closure of my review. Through the Longing Daze does not conform to one strict schema (“April Breezes” appears fourth in the collection); rather, it maps short trails from despair to quiet triumph--routes that replicate their technique of traversal: of incessant, hard-won advance. Even so, the proportion of happier, hence more flowing, poems steadily rises through the end. That increase coincides with a narrative trend toward light (from “12:01 a.m.,” whence the collection begins), cast (vis-à-vis brutally “thrown” in poem one) by the protective as productive arc of a loving marriage. As H.D. offered points to compare, so might a third sensuous poet, whose personal trials somewhat accord with these others’. The parallels in context and cadence, never mind the fortuitous coincidence of fruit, begs the following collocation. Anna Akhmatova mused:
He loved three things alone: White peacocks, evensong, Old maps of America. He hated children crying, And raspberry jam with his tea, And womanish hysteria. …And he had married me.4
Contrast, nearly ninety years hence:
He brought her raspberries And white chocolate Aroused her passion With ordinary words And tears Stories of his life Stories of his fantasy— Of what could be
He gave her jewels And poetry Enlightened her mind With intimate intrigue And bold Ideas about the world Ideas about the past --their future
He took her heart And love Embraced her body With passions new And deep Beyond her past Beyond her now --her hopes
He offered her life And joy Trusted her to love With new found hope And desire More than his past More than his now --his life
He brought her raspberries white chocolate and
himself The fourth stanza clarions that the Pitchfords need not choose between excellence in life or excellence in work5 – that both boons accrue to each partner. (The mutual assistance rendered to create “the we of you and me”6 cannot go undetected, here or in such poems as “Together We Read,” “Bent Double,” “The Box,” “While You Were Gone,” and “Explore the Shadows.”) What precedes in “He Brought Her Raspberries,” however, stands – again, abetted by rhythmic and contentual, also triadic likeness – so starkly against “He loved three things alone.”
Whether Ms. Pitchford matches the Russian maestra, time will tell. In her favor, the former has (let’s hope) more than half her work ahead of her. Yet however dark these days or the considerable talent one possesses, no poet can express a nation’s soul as Akhmatova was positioned to, and did, articulate. But artists write from joy, of course, as well as heartache; and, God willing, Siobhan Pitchford shall continue her own harvesting of a field neither Akhmatova nor H.D. ever had the fortune to sow.
1.) Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley, 1971), 175-77. 2.) Hence, she has sealed that chasm “The Hollow Men” iteratively despair of “Between the idea And the reality Between the motion and the act.” Her book entire is instructively informed if read as a reaction to Eliot’s poem—inclusive of, particularly early, responses empathetic with the speakers. 3.) “Conditioning the Conditioner,” along with “Get Me Away from the Weekend Getaway,” a genuinely funny poem in the collection, ( – others elicit grins, namely “Heavenly Voodoo,” Wine Wisdom,” “Along Tree Tops,” even “The Seat of Stress”--) exemplifies Ms. Pitchford’s expertise with both shortest and elongated lines. The crème de la protracteur occurs at the very end. 4.) Anna Akhmatova, Selected Poems, trans. D.M. Thomas (London: Penguin, 1985) 16. The poet speaks of her first husband, the Russian ‘Acmeist’ Nikolai Gumilev. 5.) Pace Yeats, “The Choice.” A less contrived conjunction of Ms. P and WBY highlights the complementarity in her “Cupped in Your Palm”:
by pain, lifted by the love in my smile a luxury not found in other lives.
– to his in “No Second Troy”
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind That is not natural in an age like this.
The swimming against the iambic tide in these second lines (whether one chooses, as I do, to scan them regularly) creates a sound rarely found in poetry of any age. The singular cadence in each case attests to the strikingness of the figures therein portrayed (the Pitchfords; Maude Gonne). Note, too, the continued morphology of form to feeling: Yeats’ curtal sonnet miming Maude’s taughtness; the added line to the ‘octave’ of “Cupped in Your Palm” figuring broader breathing room for the lovers.
6.) Comment on how both incorporate, and harmonize their particular employment of “The we of you and me” in Orpheus and Eurydice: Dialogues. “Dialogues” is due to be released by Daybreak Press in February 2005.
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