[Lance Levens]

There's also gloom and doom in the fifties generation I don't see in the current crop of women poets. Post WWII perhaps
women felt they needed to sound a note of post-Hiroshima gravitas. I prefer our current ladies' agile ability to take on all the personae.

[Jennifer Reeser]

An amusing anecdote with only slight relation to Tim's digression here...

I know the Russian language, am a translator of the Russian poets (mostly Anna Akhmatova), and several years ago, was invited by Dana Gioia and Michael Peich to participate in a West Chester critical seminar which brought together a panel of about seven translator/poets from Moscow, to discourse with an American group including such translators as F.D. (Frank) Reeve -- Frost's translator in Russia -- as well as Jim Kates, Russian translator and co-director of Zephyr Press, with a number of professors, etc., from across the United States.

Len Krisak moderated our group, and made me the "sacrificial lamb" of sorts, throwing a few of my translations first thing out on the table, to get our discussions going. One of those was the translation of a poem originally by the Russian writer Marina Tsvetaeva. We discussed my attempt at length; then, when our allotted time was up, one of the Moscow gentlemen approached me, to continue giving a few insights into some of the peculiarites of Marina's work in general, and mine in particular. I have largely forgotten the conversation, though one thing remains. Just before we separated, he concluded his observations to me with a passionate insistence that Tsvetaeva "must only be translated by a woman"!

[Suzanne Doyle]

This forum was my introduction to Deborah's work. (OK, so I live under a rock.) While I admire all the poems quoted here, I have to acknowledge the genius at work in "SHEEPDOG TRIALS AT BLEINAU FFESTINIOG." I've never read a more accurate description of these dogs. And while I'm not a advocate of imitative form (you know, the poem about angels typed into the shape of wings on a page), the way that Deborah handles these lines and the language so that you have a sense that at any moment both are just going to rip out of her control and go careening down page, is exactly the feeling you have when you see these dogs at work. With long, hard training, they will go from zero to a hundred mph and then a dead stop in seconds, leaving you breathless with admiration, as I am of Deborah.

[Susan McLean]

I bought Deborah's first book, The Size of Happiness, at the West Chester Poetry Conference and read it while flying home. Since I was bumped from a flight, I had lots of time to read and therefore finished it on the trip. As soon as I got home, I had to write Deborah a fan letter. I had enjoyed the book so thoroughly that it was hard even to tell her my favorite poems, there were so many.

Though I hear her referred to as a New England poet (and there are some poems that could justify that designation) she strikes me as being much more cosmopolitan than that term implies. There is an enormous range to her subjects, in time, space, and literatures. She has a questing and questioning spirit that refuses to accept the easy answers, even from herself. Some of her poems are wry, some moving. I feel a sense of Virgil's "the tears of things" behind some of her poems, but faced in a tough-minded rather than sentimental way. The poems are clearly worded, but without sacrificing depth.

Susan

[A. E. Stallings]

I love these--and Deborah's way with myth here (the Odyssean business traveller, the wonderful Dido song...) But one of the niftiest things about Deborah's work to me is the way there is often a line or rhyme or lack of rhyme that subverts the form. You could read Elizabeth's Dress and think that it was written in cross-rhymed quatrains, but it isn't--there is, wonderfully, no rhyme for "ankles". Take also the penultimate stanza of the business traveller poem, where we go for a moment from cross-rhyme to envelope rhyme, so that room and home are suddenly kept at arm's length. It's like a magician showing you how the trick works, over and over again, and yet still pulling off the illusion right before your eyes.

[This message has been edited by A. E. Stallings (edited November 20, 2008).]