It was a pretty big day here at the Sphere when Rhina joined our merry band. Len went over to help her fire up her coal-powered computer, and I posted the following welcoming remarks:
Introduction to Rhina Espaillat
Yesterday our own Len Krisak was to introduce this remarkable poet to the mysteries of the ‘Sphere. Rhina ascribes her technophobia to her being a contemporary of Thomas Wyatt. Actually, she’s a contemporary of Plath and Sexton, and the contrast between their shrill dementia and Rhina’s wry wisdom could not be greater. Born in the Dominican Republic, she came to New York aged seven; and she writes in both English and her native Spanish. A lifelong teacher, she is a skilled and tactful corrector of other poets’ errors (including my own); and she will be a great addition to the Metrical Board. She is master (mistress?) of many intricate forms, including the villanelle, the ballade, and her favorite: the sonnet in all its infinite varieties.
Lapsing to Grace, her first collection, was published in 1992. Where Horizons Go, her second, won the Eliot Prize in 1998. Her third, Rehearsing Absence, won the Wilbur Prize last week and will appear next year.
Her graceful verse is characterized by a bemused melancholy and serenity which are precious hard to find in American letters. Her experiences as a daughter, mother and grandmother, illuminate her best poems. She might iterate on iteration a bit much for my taste, but this being a poetry site, I’ll close these brief remarks with the final poem in Horizons, an exquisite sonnet entitled “Why Publish?”
Dusty and brown on some forgotten shelf
a century hence—or two, let dreams be grand!—
this wry and slanted gloss upon myself
has slipped into some stranger’s browsing hand.
A woman, maybe, growing old like me,
or a young man ambitious for his name,
curious about my antique prosody
but pleased to find our motives much the same.
He cannot know—nor she—what this one life
from the late twentieth craved, or cost, or found;
he will forget my name; but mother, wife,
daughter has struck a chord, sings from the ground
a moment to his ear, as now to yours,
for what is ours in common and endures.
The only other time I wrote anything about this woman I so revere was when Bill Baer asked me for a jacket comment on Rehearsing Absence. By then I'd gotten over my prejudice against iteration on iteration, and in fact, my comment focussed on "the light carpentry midair," from the sonnet first quoted on this thread. For all my love of wrath and death and sturm und drang, as I grow older I come more and more to value poets who have latched on to some corner of serenity, whose utterances have, in Wilbur's words, "the quality of something made, Like a good fiddle, like the rose's scent, Like a rose window or the firmament."
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