One of my students, a talented poet, is working on a project influenced by Debora Greger’s Off-Season at the Edge of the World, and she lent me her copy so we could discuss it. Of course, I’ve been slow turning to it–this semester is, well, overwhelming–and she needs me to return it. The good news today was that invigilating a make-up midterm gave me an opportunity to read it, finally. The even better news is that this book is wonderful.
Off-Season at the Edge of the World is more than 30 years old. I had never heard of its author, who taught English at the University of Florida and won all kinds of awards. If the rest of her writing is like this, she deserved the accolades. The poems tend to be in tight stanzas–couplets, tercets, quatrains–with subtle patterns of sound and surprising metaphors. Take the poem “Three Graces,” for instance, which comes with the subtitle “after Canova”:
In the dim tent they are dimmer still,
three elephants chained by the leg
one to the next, one to the ground.
Fogbound oceans, they ebb and surge
in a leathery tide. Lost in a rhythm
not even feeding stops, they rock again
the black hold of a freighter
tossed on open seas, the dark portholes
of their unblinking eyes unfathomable.
The tattered maps of their ears
flick away the local flies.
Nothing to them our incurious stares,
having no use for us who neither
feed them nor let them go.
There is no grace as dark as theirs.
That extended metaphor of these circus animals (why else would they be in a tent?) as the sea, their movements as the tide, their eyes “unfathomable”–I wish I could write like that. And the last line! Wow.
I don’t know how my student ran across Greger’s poems, but I’m grateful that she shared them with me.