(I hope I've made it clear that for me, Musing on Mastery need not be limited to the canonized, but is useful as a space to discuss the works of other poets.)
I realized the last few poets I posted, Dickinson, Heaney, Owen, all share a love for slant rime of one variety or another. This is one of my favorite contemporary sonnets, and I think it exploits slant rime beautifully. There are so many things "balanced" or "balancing" in this poem--not only the teetering rimes that somehow become plumb at the end, but the two points of view, Diverne's double life, the elegant diction of narration versus the colloquial chorus, etc.--a wonderful blend of form and function. It comes from a sequence of poems about Diverne, Pomp (her child by her white master), and Pomp's children, in the book/section "Homeplace" (from <u>The Fields of Praise</u>, Louisiana State University Press.) Poems in "Homeplace" range from sonnets, villanelles, ballades, quatrains to free verse.
Balance
He watch her like a coonhound watch a tree.
What might explain the metamorphosis
he underwent when she paraded by
with tea-cakes, in her fresh and shabby dress?
(As one would carry water from a well--
straight-backed, high-headed, like a diadem,
with careful grace so that no drop will spill--
she balanced, almost brimming, her one name.)
She think she something, stuck-up island bitch.
Chopping wood, hanging laundry on the line,
and tantalizingly within his reach,
she honed his body's yearning to a keen,
sharp point. And on that point she balanced life.
That hoe Diverne think she Marse Tyler's wife.
And another sonnet from the sequence, this in slant-rimed terza rima (Frost's "I have been one acquainted with the night" uses this variation--though with tight terza rima).
Chosen
Diverne wanted to die, that August night
his face hung over hers, a sweating moon.
She wished so hard, she killed part of her heart.
If she had died, her one begotten son,
her life's one light, would never have been born.
Pomp Atwood might have been another man:
born with a single race, another name.
Diverne might not have known the starburst joy
her son would give her. And the man who came
out of a twelve-room house and ran to her
close shack across three yards that night, to leap
onto her cornshuck pallet. Pomp was their
share of the future. And it wasn't rape.
In spite of her raw terror. And his whip.
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Threaded Mode
