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At a time of grief over the death of a close friend, the world seems changed. In her recent book, White Sea (Sarabande Books, 2005), Cleopatra Mathis, the featured reader at the November Hoot, explores this theme in elegant and magisterial language. Here is one of the poems she read:  

WHITE MORNING

 How could it be so ruined, the woods

ravished by a grainy sleet, a gravelly white

sodden leaves and limbs poke through.

I have lost my killer instinct

for beauty, for embellishing and relishing

the art of it. No lacework to imagine

here: the spoiled autumn

dies into slush, and the deer who roamed free

yesterday, the thrill of my gaze locking theirs,

have quit the neighborhood. Not one captured thing

to trade, though I look hard

first one way into the wasted repetition,

then the other, but no, I cannot

coax a quarrel out of this unforgiving ground.

                                        – Cleopatra Mathis

Everywhere she looks, the narrator finds life in the woods “spoiled,” “ruined,” “ravished,” or “wasted.” No longer is she able to find beauty in every scene: She has “lost [her] killer instinct for beauty.”  What is left is “unforgiving.” She “look[s] hard” but there is no way, no trick of the mind, to escape the desolation that she feels.

 There are many things to love and admire in this poem: the wonderful first line, the choice of line breaks, how the language captures the narrator’s mood and feelings are conveyed by vivid contrasting images. Each carefully chosen word and phrase contributes to produce this beautiful and memorable poem.

– Harvey Shepard                                                                                                   hshepard@gmail.com

“White Morning” copyright 2005 by Cleopatra Mathis. Cleopatra Mathis's sixth book of poems is White Sea, published by Sarabande Books in 2005. Her work has appeared widely in magazines, journals, textbooks, and anthologies. In 1982 she founded the creative writing program at Dartmouth College, where she is Frederick Sessions Beebe Professor in the Art of Writing.