[Terese Coe]

Since there are several reviews here that I did for The Alsop Review (which is long gone from the net) and/or Amazon, I should also add my review of Deborah Warren's The Size of Happiness published in 2003. It appeared at The Alsop Review in 2004.


ISBN #1-904 1 30-04-6, The Waywiser Press

The Size of Happiness puts the universe on trial, but Deborah Warren’s poems let it off easy, and with musicality and ironic good sense. She questions the sublime and the enigmatic, the profitable and the futile, and accords equal acceptance to both. Her curiosity is applied to reason, ephemerality, our origins, the varieties of shades of a color, the solitude of the Queen of Spades, whether the Jerusalem artichoke is an artichoke, cancer and its repercussions, why the Trojans opened the gate for the “Trojan” horse, Greek myth, and all manner of unruliness (especially that of love)—and more.

She looks for reason in unusual, as well as in the usual, places. Weightiness morphs into any one of a number of surprises, and her metaphysics is elemental and tentatively instructive. On the subject of love—all-encompassing, glorious and distressing love—she is both analytical and reasonably flippant, as in “Why?”

You want some reason I can cite
for loving him? Go ask the sea
about its bondage to the moody
crooked moon. But don’t ask me.

In “Bargain,” Warren examines how we bargain with God, and turns the profit motive inside-out. What does it mean to make a deal with oneself and then break it? She taps underground resources of maverick wisdom, some of which she seems to have learned from her farmer’s communions with the world of the four-legged. “Sheepdog Trials at Bleinau Ffestiniog” is destined to become a popular favorite, with its close, even preternatural, observation of sheepdogs’ choreography for a “flotilla of sheep.” Her joy in this is contagious.

Sheepdog Trials at Bleinau Ffestiniog

At the bottom of the field, like wooly boats,
three sheep appear. They’re unaware, of course,
that this is a race, and the first one’s gently drifting
off to the left, and another bobbles and floats
the other way, when something—a gale? a force—
tears at them—veers—its direction shifting, shifting—

a black and white Hermes, fur and motion spurred
by a single message, a single mission: To herd.
A centrifugal ewe like a prodigal yacht
sails out in a stately and leisured trot
but huffily reconsiders, deterred
by the scouring dog; and the second and third

who are heading off—confronted, stop:
he’s there; and the trio slews around,
jibing in unison, parallel. Then,
in a climax of ecstasy—he drops
suddenly, puddle-flat, onto the ground
and sends the flotilla of sheep to the pen.

And the lumbering trainer, rubber-shod,
closes the gate with his crook and slogs
across to the dog who, you could say, ran
because he was told to. You could say the man
created the dog. But no—the dog,
who was finally made by the wind, is a little god.


Joy is the coin of the kingdom in many of her poems. In “Landscape in March,” it is translated into the aphoristic remnants of peak experience: hypnotic, matriarchal perhaps, determined, with traces of an ecstasy that comes, with luck, from preoccupation with the natural world.

A number of Warren’s poems show a solemn concern with management. “Managing the Planets” is the title of one section in this collection: the “planets” may be one’s own teenagers, an ailing tree, a herd of ruminants, or a figure in the Bayeux tapestry. Warren holds them up to scrutiny from this angle and that; she will either make sense of them or she will make sense of not making sense. She continually reflects on uncertainty and the tiny handholds it gives up to the seeker. In “Grand Larcener,” she describes the theft of a heart: “although there’s nothing there,/ it’s heavier than the heavy thing that’s gone.” “Hill Start,” about a 17-year-old learning to work a clutch on a hill, asks “How/convince the sweating Sisyphus it will/ (after he tops this stretch) be all downhill?”

She is tantalized by a quote about the Bayeux tapestry (1070-1080) which says “where a certain cleric and Aelfgyva…” but abruptly ends. In “Aelfgyva,” Warren writes:

We’ve all had an Aelfgyva-at-the-palace.
In she jumps unushered some dull Monday
Abrupt as luck—no thread of exposition
Offered in advance—and disappears
Before her sentence even gets its verb;
And yet we’re stuck with her.

A few lines later, she goes on, at first amusingly:

And pricks you to embroider her an ending,
Marry or kill her off—or anything
But keep her, flanked by dragon-headed pillars,
Scarlet-wimpled, maddening and hanging
There, beside her cleric, as a question
You can neither sew up or unsew.
But keep her. She’s the thing you need the most—
More than the things you can completely know.

This is classic Warren. She toys with her own curiosity, and the reader’s, to amuse or investigate, and finally finds her level with a conclusion at once matter-of-fact, wise and dazzling. At times, she sounds impatient, as if she protested being put on the adviser’s hotseat once again—impatient, but game. She has no compunctions about applying the distinct impracticality of studying the quadratic formula to her poem’s concern with managing “the problem of desire.”

In “Destination,” she gives a tacit response to Gertrude Stein. The question becomes, Is there ever there?

It doesn’t so much disappear as change
Into a thing that isn’t what you thought
And cackles down the road to rearrange
Itself a little further on—alive
And kicking—yes. But it’s a different spot.

Deborah Warren’s work is New England: ruggedly individualistic, dedicated to her husband and children but hardly in a conventional manner, and dedicated to the earth and things of the earth. She is at home in a cow pasture or a myth, a sonnet or a shrug. Unsurprisingly, her work has received the recognition of the Robert Penn Warren Prize (2000), the Nemerov Sonnet Award (2001), and the Robert Frost Award (2002).

Warren’s work shows that, in the very act of deploying rhyme and meter, weightiness is countered and transformed—into pleasure. If at times that pleasure is quirky, so much the better. She finds music everywhere, and makes myth and legend not only accessible but intimately known and knowable. Coming upon her personal ordering of the universe is refreshing, one of the finer rewards that can be had today.

Terese Coe