Eratosphere - Deck the Halls: Please Welcome Catharine Savage Brosman

Catharine Savage Brosman is une femme d’un certain age whose work I have admired for years in the pages of the Sewanee Review and Chronicles. She is professor emerita of French at Tulane University in Louisiana and she is research professor at the University of Sheffield (U.K.). For the last four years she has served as poetry editor of Chronicles, where she has published some of the Sphereans’ finest work. Her c.v. is twenty-five single-spaced pages long, but here are the poetry books and chapbooks:

Watering (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972) [poems].
Abiding Winter (Florence, Ky: R. L. Barth, 1983) [poems–chapbook].
Journeying to Canyon de Chelly (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1990) [poems]
Passages (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1996) [poems].
The Swimmer and Other Poems (Edgewood, Ky: R.L. Barth, 2000) [poems–chapbook].
Places in Mind (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2000) [poems].
Petroglyphs: Poems and Prose (privately printed by Jubilee: A Festival of the Arts, Nicholls State University, Thibodaux, 2003) [chapbook].
The Muscled Truce (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2003) [poems]
Range of Light (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2007) [poems].
Breakwater (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2009).
Trees in a Park (Thibodaux: Blue Chicory Press, 2010) [chapbook]
Under the Pergola (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, forthcoming 2011).
On the North Slope (Macon: Mercer University Press, forthcoming 2012).

Catharine is a native of the Rockies who summers in Colorado Springs, by the Garden of the Gods under the shadow of Pike’s Peak. Being a creature of the American West myself, it was her poems set on the Front Range that so aroused my admiration when I began reading her fifteen years ago. She is a formal poet of great virtuosity and is equally adept at free verse. Eratosphereans will have the chance to read seven unpublished poems in the next two issues of Able Muse and read the author’s interview which I conducted. We’re very grateful that Catharine has agreed to judge Deck the Halls, a celebration of our finest offerings. By way of really introducing her, here are four poems, one from her next book and three from Breakwater.

Pike’s Peak, Sundown: A Tableau

It’s mid-September, and the light,
the master-régisseur of summer’s play,
                              is working on the final set, tonight,
before the scenery is blown away.

                              Escorted by the Rampart Range, the peak
sails smoothly, ocean-blue with glints of brass,
though past the timberline a scarring streak
of white announces snow in a crevasse.

                              The eastern face grows shadowy; the sun,
as though relieved to leave pure azure sky,
stays still a moment, then drops down, undone,
behind the cusp, but turns its spotlights high

                              to gild the flat-topped cumulus. Good Lord!
Here’s Rubens; worse, a schmaltzy Hallmark scene,
with heavenly rays and nimbus angels, bored
by sunset’s pathos and its painted mien.

It’s nature’s show, but nature might rethink
its principles of art, a bit absurd,
and draw a pleasing line in India ink—
the peak in silhouette, a soaring bird.

                              For true art wants distinction, grace, reserve,
                              and cogent wit—a classical quartet,
a piece by Bach or Satie, or a serve
by McEnroe that whistles past the net.

                              But this display’s a Russian overture,
or Wagner—such loud chords, such great events
and self-importance!—signs that it’s unsure
of its true worth without these ornaments.

          And yet, I like it. Strange. It’s present, real.
If one admires a still-life so precise
that hungry crows pick at a lemon peel,
then nature imitating man’s device

must be allowed. The light has dimmed. A feat
of chiaroscuro spreads; a bird ascends.
Bad art has turned to good: supreme conceit!
That’s how a great romantic painter ends.

© Catharine Savage Brosman. First published in Méasŭre, 2008; collected in Under the Pergola, LSU Press, forthcoming fall 2011.

In the Hayman Burn

What profusion of wild flowers in hues of fire bloom
this summer—scarlet gilia, blue harebells, yellow
cinquefoil, Queen Anne’s lace—where flames
of the same incandescent colors took a forest down—
the grass scorched first, the very ground

exhausted, aspen, pines, and fir, in green armadas
on the waving hillsides, stripped and charred,
their skeletons erect still, useless masts, or fallen,
driftwood, in the wreckage. It was all (she said)
to burn a letter in a campfire. That year, the drought,

a vampire, had prowled the mountains greedily,
drying up the springs and creeks and sucking
trees with hot, consuming breath. The man she loved
had not responded as she’d wished; and so
his image had to be destroyed. Who hasn’t wished

to turn a memory to smoke? To wipe a moment,
or another being, from the world, to prove that love
is merely ash and air, by altering its tokens
in consuming chemistry, because one cannot change
oneself, or undo time, where thoughts are wisps

of nothingness, just little tropisms, but acts are stones.
Today the air is clear; the snows of recent winters
and the patient seeds have bored through soil,
and rains this season, generous with drops
of succulence, have also washed out death, as tears

long-distilled relieve regret. I do not have another fifty
years; I’ve got to take the forest as it is, half-
ruined, wishing things redone, imagining green life,
young trees, a chance to kindle a new fire in the heart—
catching, glowing steadily, burning without loss.

From Breakwater: Poems (© Mercer University Press, 2009).

D.H. Lawrence in the Hopi Lands

“Who is that Mormon over there,
emaciated, with the putty face
and reddish whiskers, pale?” The question, put
by Laura Armer—painter, writer too—
was reasonable, since the fellow had
black, flat-topped headgear of the sort preferred
by Mormons then and sold at trading posts.
The answer, though, was unexpected: “That

is D.H. Lawrence.” They had driven long—
some thousand miles, in all—from Taos, he
and Frieda, Tony, Mabel, to observe
the Hopi Snake Dance, on Third Mesa top
at Hotevilla, then ride on to view
Canyon de Chelly. He had been skeptical,
disdainful of the Indians, the brown
and primitive, who made him yearn again

for Europe; he loathed tourists. Still, he sat,
with others, on the ground, by Armer’s feet,
to watch the rite as desert holy men
held rattlesnakes—becalmed somehow, well-washed
and oiled, but writhing hard—between their teeth.
The corn dance in New Mexico was strange,
yet subtle—like the Zuni rituals,
neat, beautiful; the Hopis’ was grotesque,

though mystical—a marriage of the good
and evil, recognizing poison’s power,
intended to domesticate the will
of darkest spirits and appropriate
their potency. Lorenzo likewise wished
to find the hidden Source, not God
but gods, and yield to their beneficence;
thus he who preached to women dominance

by men was mastered as the Hopis whirled,
responding to the horns of darkness, fear,
malevolence and venom, challenging
themselves, the world. The vipers sometimes fell
and slithered off, but were pursued and caught
with sticks, and dancers took them in their mouths
again; while Lawrence, mesmerized, advanced
just slightly, thinking of the bright green snake

he’d painted on the door of Mabel’s house,
entwined around a sunflower—potent signs
of heavens, earth, desire. The dancers’ limbs
and serpents radiated—arrows shot
at life, with sapience and courage sharp
enough to pierce its core. Lorenzo let
vitality flow through him—heroes’ strength—
but wore his lungs out in the cosmic song.

From Breakwater: Poems (© Mercer University Press, 2009).

Tree in Winter

In frozen gestures—sculpted, fixed in place—
the maple tree, now leafless, stark, and blind,
devises, from its denudation, grace,
its seven limbs uplifted, arched, entwined;

like Shiva, who destroys and then creates—
the master of the universal dance,
a constant tourbillon, the round of fates,
disposing newly of the stuff of chance.

The tree’s deep being orders the design
of root and trunk—no alien intent—
well replicated in each texture, line,
and leaf—implicit as the branch is bent.

And thus, in its intensity of fact,
it carries promise—sap run, dress of green—
its visions wedded in the verdant act
of opening its eye-buds, proud, serene.