Thank you, Michael, for starting a Gail White thread. Long overdue! I also am a fan. (I've been in the States for a couple of weeks, and only just returned, so sorry for the tardy response.)
Sometimes I think our age in poetry will be remembered for how unbelievably slow it was to publish books of some of its finest contemporaries (and how quick to publish a book a year by some of its worst). I am thrilled to learn her much-awaited collection is in the works! (And am off to order it forthwith.)
Here are some poems from the book <u>Landscapes with Women: Four American Poets </u>(Martha Bosworth, Rhina P. Espaillat, Barbara Loots and Gail White), with a forward by Richard Wilbur (Singular Speech Press,1999). This is definitely a book worth having--all four poets have wonderful stuff here, and play off each others voices well. (The book can be found on Amazon, I believe).
Gail is probably best known for her "light" verse with wicked teeth, as this favorite of mine (odd lines should be indented):
Unmarried Victorian Lady, Photographed among Ruins
Minnie went sailing down the Nile
and sketched the ruins in her journal.
She faced disasters with a smile
and merely called the heat "infernal."
Her sister married and became
enmeshed in life's domestic trammels,
while Minnie weathered hurricanes
and managed crews of Moors and camels.
Her mother kept the parlor filled
with guests and tea and flower painting.
She spoke of Minnie with distilled
regret and mild attempts at fainting.
Her sister bore a seventh child
and swore that Min was quite inhuman,
while Minnie breezed along the Nile
and missed fulfillment as a woman.
But "light" verse is merely a thin band of her spectrum. Gail White also works in the sublime. (Even here, though, she is not without an ironic Ozymandias-ish bite):
The Engulfed Cathedral
With a keener eye for symbols than for sense,
they built their church on sand. The last great boat
to bear God's folk--whale-ribbed, shark-jawed, immense,
a gothic monster, light enough to float
(it seemed) in the sunset. And the faithful flocked
to mass, packing the sand with steady shoes,
year after year. When finally they stopped,
leaving the altar floomy and unused,
the unsettled sand would heap and then subside
restlessly. Seabirds perched on gargoyle heads
with mocking cries. Eventually the tide
itself changed pattern, cut a new sea-bed,
and every morning up the narrow nave
cam workshippers, wave after silent wave.
And as Mike mentioned, she is one of those rare "formalists" with a keen ear for free verse. This one always gives me a chill:
Settlement
Who gets custody of the bones
under the bed, he asked.
I do, she said. Community property.
You had no bones under the bed
before you married me.
Now just a minute, he said,
I earned them myself.
But I put you through school, she said,
And that gives me a stake.
Don't be so hard, he said.
Remember where we got that skull?
That was in Venice--
we were so much in love then.
I don't want to part with the skull,
it's full of memories.
You'll be lucky if I leav you the femurs,
she said in a rage.
Don't try to soft-soap me,
you sonofabitch.
Listen! They're rattling,
he said.
They've done it at night
but not in the daytime before.
What, are you still afraid
of the bones? she asked.
Oh yes. Oh yes.
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