I can write rhyming pentameter quatrains til the cows come home, but what most puzzles me about Catharine is her extraordinary ability to write vers libre. The lineation is always perfect, however startling. Do we detect "the ghost of pentameter" in her free verse? Of course we do.
As we do in Eliot and the handful of other people whose attempts at this lack of iambic measure really appeal to me, commit themselves to my fading mnemonic faculties. Catharine originally sent poems one, three and four for me to post here, but I wanted a free verse poem, for we are a community of fixed and free poets. Consider this excerpt from the poem above:
..........................That year, the drought,
a vampire, had prowled the mountains greedily,
drying up the springs and creeks and sucking
trees with hot, consuming breath.
I laughed aloud when I read it, recalling the borrowed million or so I lost farming in the drought of 88, when folks joked they had seen "two trees fighting over a male dog." What turns me on so much about Brosman? I was astonished to receive a letter from the editor of the Mercer University Press, who asked me to comment on Breakwater, her 2009 collection. This was my response:
"George Weigle has described Benedict XVI as "the most civilized person on earth," but Catharine Savage Brosman gives him serious competition. One of the ways I learned to write about the American West was studying Brosman. She is an accurate observer, deft in the deployment of her vast vocabulary. The publication of Breakwater is cause for this Dakotan to celebrate."
Last edited by Tim Murphy; 12-06-2010 at 06:57 PM.
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