The Barnes & Noble Review
Here are a few lines you might not expect from a 77-year-old grandmother:
Heart, you bully, you punk, I'm wrecked, I'm shocked
stiff. You? you still try to rule the world — though
I've got you: identified, starving, locked
in a cage you will not leave alive, no
matter how you hate it, pound its walls,
& thrill its corridors with messages.
One thing Marie Ponsot does not lack is energy. "One Is One," excerpted above, shows Ponsot's bread-and-butter skill as a poet: her ability to make the reader feel the delight of consonants, vowels, and breath. Often praised for how they gracefully fit into traditional poetic forms, Ponsot's poems always leave room for magnificent rhythms.
Here, the repeated "k"s of "punk," "wrecked," and "shocked" layered on top of the direct stressed-first-syllable address of "Heart, you bully" create a savage, high-voltage opening that befits a diatribe against one's own heart. That teenage feeling of being split apart is reined in by an older, muscular command of sound, a mature knowledge of what makes the ear react.
But sound is far from the most interesting quality Ponsot brings to the table. She's a quintessential maverick, both in her personal life and her poetic life. Ponsot raised seven children, mostly on her own, and frequently wrote about them. "The Bird Catcher," Ponsot's fourth volume of poems, includes loving descriptions of feeding and bathing her children. Indeed, motherhood is the probable explanation for why Ponsot did the unthinkable for a poet hoping to make a career as apoet —she waited 24 years between her first and second books. So True Minds (1957) was finally followed by Admit Impediment in 1981. The Green Dark, Ponsot's third volume, appeared in 1988. But Ponsot was working all along, publishing 37 translations, raising children, and quietly crafting poems.
The Bird Catcher won the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, despite the fact that its author did not follow the path that's supposed to lead to awards. One of the first poems in the book is titled "I've Been Around: It Gets Me Nowhere." Other poems also seem confident in their knowledge of the world and in their creator's choice to raise many children alone while making poems far away from the spotlight. Though assured, these are also overtly thankful poems. Here is the opening ode "To the Muse of the Doorways Edges Verges," which is about how poems come to the poet:
Her few words amaze me.
Her visits are irregular,
brief. When our eyes meet,
how I am drawn to her.
I keep honey cakes, in case,
in the freezer. Once
she stayed for tea.
Ponsot's poetic confidence is not only matched by her gratitude for that confidence but also marked by a willingness to cast doubt, to turn a poem inside out only to prove that her initial tack was correct. Here, for example, is the second stanza of "One is One":
Brute. Spy. I trusted you. Now you reel & brawl
in your cell but I'm deaf to your rages,
your greed to go solo, your eloquent
threats of what you (knowing me) could do.
Here again, Ponsot flaunts her control over the ear with the short and thudding "Brute. Spy." followed by the steaming, comma-filled rush that mimics actual rage. Then, the parenthetical "knowing me" displays complete control over the poem's direction. That control shows up again in one of the strongest poems here, a villanelle that takes a simple yet self-contradicting line and milks it for all it's worth. Unlike "One is One," in this villanelle Ponsot sounds like a wise older mother and grandmother. But in these first lines of the maternally titled "Reminder," she's still spunky:
I am rich I am poor. Time is all I own.
I spend or hoard it for experience.
By the bitten wound the biting tooth is known.
In that first line, Ponsot uses 11 monosyllabic words. In fact, the first long word in the poem is "experience," which coming after all those short words, sounds much weightier than it is. Placement — like the "punk/wrecked/shocked" of the opening — is used again to help create meaning. Of course, "bitten " and "biting" again show that delight in sound.
Delight may come easily to Ponsot, since even poverty and old age sound good in her hands. Here's Ponsot's view of saving, odd in this age of 401(k) plans:
Thrift is a venomous error, then, a stone
named bread or cash to support the pretense
that I'm rich. I am poor; time is all I own...
Despite the numerous references to scanty economic resources, these poems are far from poor in their references. "Reading a Large Serving Dish" memorializes an ancient Greek dish seen in the Art Institute of Chicago. Other poems invoke myth, Latin literature, and even a few poets from the 1950s. The muses here, like the poet herself, are varied and eclectic. In poem after poem, Ponsot seems grateful for influence, thankful for knowledge and for life itself.
— Aviya Kushner
Like the grieving widow in Ponsot's sonnet 'Festival of Bread,' whose spirits are leavened in the act of making, the poet 'kneads silence down into dough, and lets it rise.' Whether exploring a shipwreck or a bed of perennials, the poems reveal the moral drama enacted just beneath the surfaces of the natural world. Ponsot attends to elegant forms without losing sight of what they are there to express: the cadences of a life passionately considered.
A gorgeous example of why Ponsot deserves the reputation she's slowly built...The language is brilliant, quirky, compact...All her work projects the iridescent insistence of a poet speaking just as she wants to speak.
— San Francisco Chronicle
'The tale has bends in it,' says Ponsot, who is amazed and amused by the twists and turns in the raw folk material she reads. The lyrics here have bends that are every bit as amazing and amusing: 'We praise your recurring, the continuous bass of your/ luminous groundwork./ We hear you. Your melodies ride/ the beat of silence between/ your old light and new light.' The same careful attention given here to the moon is given to everything, including the language and music with which Ponsot considers it all, the heavens and earth. Her poetry is personal but charged with science and the natural world, with history and myth: a child's gestures are 'hieractic, just like Caesar or Sappho/ or Mary's Jesus or Ann's Mary or Jane/ Austen once, or me or your mother's you.'
Ponsot, whose first volume of poems appeared in 1957, is an important but often overlooked writer. Her work belongs in every contemporary poetry collection. -- Louis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Center, Philadelphia
Like the grieving widow in Ponsot's sonnet 'Festival of Bread,' whose spirits are leavened in the act of making, the poet 'kneads silence down into dough, and lets it rise.' Whether exploring a shipwreck or a bed of perennials, the poems reveal the moral drama enacted just beneath the surfaces of the natural world. Ponsot attends to elegant forms without losing sight of what they are there to express: the cadences of a life passionately considered.
"The poems reveal the moral drama enacted just beneath the surface of the natural world. Ponsot attends to elegant forms without losing sight of what they are there to express."
—The New Yorker
