I'm laughing that the two other poets who have commented on this thread are, like Catharine, Louisianans, and both of them poets whom I have long and seriously admired.
I think what I most love about Catharine is what I most love about Rhina Espaillat. There is a rich wisdom redolent in every page of what they write. They are only two years apart in age (R, 1932; C, 1934.) Oh you should NEVER mention a great lady's age. But in any critical appraisal, a coming to terms with a major artist, it is useful to note, for it puts them in the larger context of the many decades they have toiled at their arts. Biologically, each is old enough to be my mother. And frankly, I despair, I DESPAIR of reaching that level of wisdom. And my objectivity? There is none, for they both serve in loco parentis to this crazed killer of doves.
The Pike's Peak poem immediately above is the sixth and final section of A Colorado Suite. I spent my adolescence in the mixed pine and aspen forests of Minnesota, felling aspens, lopping them, lashing them into signal towers, burning them to boil coffee. But Catharine resides in summer by The Garden of the Gods, near our friend David Mason in Colorado Springs; and the objects of her poems are Colorado's aspens. I see aspens in a new light when Catharine writes of them. I see two treelines, the prairie and the high massifs, separated by bands of gold. My Colorado time has been all winter, for I am a skier. Just consider the subtitles of the Suite. In the Hayman Burn, By the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, In Unaweep Canyon, By the Conejos River, Wilkerson Pass, Pike's Peak, October. I know those places only in winter, and Catharine lets me see the wild flowers of summer, the bronzed autumns when the elk descend the montane meadows in search of winter grazing. So many of her poems hammer home to me the necessity of "accurate observation." That is a Wilbur phrase which he has hammered into my red head since I was twenty-seven. As he once said to Alan and me, "More nature poets need to take your field trips." Those are trips that Brosman has taken, and my insight into the glories of creation are enriched by my acquaintance with her poetry.
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Hybrid Mode
