Vivian Shipley, Gleanings: Old Poems, New Poems

Literary Review, Spring, 2004 by Walter Cummins

Vivian Shipley, Gleanings: Old Poems, New Poems. Louisiana: Louisiana Literature Press, 2003.

Death--and its rehearsal in loss--serves as an overt presence for most of the poems in Vivian Shipley's Gleanings, and when not overt, lurks close to the surface. We die and so do those we love--parents, grandparents, uncles, favorite poets, a teenaged friend of sons, a student--as well as the unknown millions slaughtered in twentieth-century genocides. Yet, despite the frequent ache of grief, these are not despairing poems or ultimately even sad. In a larger sense, these are poems of life because Shipley faces the full context of what it means to be human. Rich in the details--tastes, smells, colors, actions--of lives lived, they become affirmations. In a sense, the poems can be read as a struggle between life and death, confrontations with the fact of mortality and an answer to why our existence has meaning. What we come away with may not be triumph, but there is satisfaction.

A number of the poems in Gleanings, Vivian Shipley's eleventh book, have appeared in previous collections. But Gleanings is a substantial work, almost 200 pages, perhaps rich enough to be considered a selective retrospective. The poems are organized in five thematic groupings, each one related to an essential subject that provides a unity to the seeming diversity.

The collection begins with a section titled "A Song My Body Cannot Sing." The poems are more eclectic than those of the other sections, as a whole lighter and happier, even when the subject is a brain tumor. They relive the joys of youth, the energies of rock and roll, the triumphs of middle age, like being the "oldest woman at the highest point on the Inca Trail." But the section ends with a cautionary note, a recognition of the body's vulnerability, the need to seize life in the perspective of death.

The second section of Gleanings, called "Leave a Taste of Earth, of Dirt" is set in Shipley's native Kentucky, focusing on the illnesses, deaths, and burials of grandparents and uncles Justus and Paul. It's not just people who die. Hogs are slaughtered, birds hunted, chickens beheaded. The processes are "inevitable" as people age and creatures are killed for food. Shipley evokes a rugged existence, details of physical struggle. As she writes in a poem to her father, "The Hard Way Was the Only Way You Knew," "... nothing worth knowing / slips from a straight trunk, is gotten without a pull."

These poems, like most in Gleanings are visual, often arising from specific scenes, vivid memories of a family past that Shipley has the ability to imbue in the reader, to make us participants in the world of her childhood. It's more than nostalgia, but rather one human response to the fact of death: "Nothing's preserved but / memory." Through poems rooted in experience, Shipley concludes the section with a reiteration of its title, a statement of her quest in "Ode on a Beet": "... wanting this world to be / enough, I leave a taste of dirt, of earth."

In "Beyond Every Bend," the third section, the poet shifts perspective from being a daughter, granddaughter, and niece to being a mother. The poems are about raising sons and the separation of losing them--from their first day of school to eventual manhood. But underlining loss and the potential danger of cars and motorcycles is the crash that killed a friend from their generation and paralyzed another, driving past "the tree that ended / Scott McNeill." The death of this sixteen year old becomes an ominous presence in several of the poems, what could happen to anyone's son.

Immediate family is absent in the fourth section, "Like a Laurel, Like a Rose." Here the poems address genocide, mass starvation, execution, murder, suicide, the terrorism of 9/11, the death of poets. It begins with "Perennial" about a neighbor exposed as a Nazi death camp functionary, then moves on to Hitler, Lizzie Borden, Marilyn Monroe, a brother-in-law, the Salem witch hunt victim Rebecca Nurse, Sylvia Plath, Assia Weevil, Emily Dickinson, George Sterling, Ezra Pound, James Merrill, a student named Christine, 9/11 and a litany of recent mass deaths, concluding with Darwinian struggle and examples of human cruelty. In the midst of all this mortality and slaughter, the poet makes a small gesture, the only one in her power, acting to preserve baby robins: "I'll crate my cat, do what I can to preserve life, however small."

A deeply personal perspective on death returns in the fifth and final section, "A Burl, a Gnarl, a Bone," with poems that reveals a daughter's reaction to her father's dying, her inability to prevent mortality: "With my father, I am still just a girl. I can't create a word / keep him from the dark, the cold, from what has no name." The best we can do, our only recourse, is to get up each morning and "accept this world, be like / my mother, learn to empty my heart of what it cannot hold." And "... My heart // a gymnast, I grab, celebrate what we have left of this world, / or day, before flesh changes to mealy mush in my hand."