I’m teaching my colleague Medrie Purdham’s book Little Housewolf this week, so I spent a couple of hours this afternoon rereading it. It’s such a delight, this exploration of the small and the domestic, of family and relationships. Looking back through the book, I see poems about a hinge, a slight burn on a woman’s foot, a painted turtle, insects, a baby tooth, a thimble, mug shots from the nineteenth century, a cup of herbal tea, a misheard word, Lego, a child’s bath. Even the ekphrastic poems tend to consider miniatures or similar images, like newspaper clippings. Well, those are the ostensible subjects, but the poems themselves reach far beyond those objects or images. “The Thimble’s Bucket List,” for instance, which is probably my favourite, is really (I think) about dreams, ambitions, desires for accomplishments unlikely to be realized: “To play a shell game with two others and a pearl,” “To stand empty in a crosswind, whiffling,” “To jamb the torturer’s tong like a stone in the beak.” The exception, the desire that’s within the thimble’s reach, brings us back to earth, to another small domestic object, a Dorset-wheel button:
No, instead, to work.
To settle into detail. To work a Dorset-wheel button, spoked with a
hundred stitches. To keep revisiting the centre. To be touched again,
again, again, again, again.
What the thimble really wants is connection, labour, a focus on the specific and the concrete, and the beautiful–not unlike the poems in this appropriately short and lovely book, which brings so much into its ambit. Every time I read Little Housewolf, I am checking references, tracking down allusions. This time, I found myself searching for “sheep may safely graze” (a lyric from a Bach aria, written by Salomon Franck), “stars will never harm you” (I couldn’t find that one, but it must be something; I’m going to have to ask), and “the war of the / Romantics” (a dispute among composers in nineteenth-century Germany), among other things I couldn’t place and/or hadn’t heard of before. There are others, but I uncovered them on earlier excursions through Little Housewolf. There’s an entire world in these poems. Their focus on small things does not mean they’re not ambitious or even global in their embrace.
I don’t think I’ve ever quoted a cover blurb in this blog, but my colleague Michael Trussler’s description of the language Purdham employs in this book is too appropriate not to include here: “Listen, you can almost overhear the individual words murmuring gratitude at suddenly finding themselves appearing on the same page together.” Yes, the linguistic surprises, the absolute accuracy and felicity of the diction–wow. Would that I could write like that.