Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their way To the siding-shed, And lined the train with faces grimly gay.
Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray As men’s are, dead.
Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp Stood staring hard, Sorry to miss them from the upland camp. Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp Winked to the guard.
So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went. They were not ours: We never heard to which front these were sent.
Nor there if they yet mock what women meant Who gave them flowers.
Shall they return to beatings of great bells In wild trainloads? A few, a few, too few for drums and yells, May creep back, silent, to still village wells Up half-known roads.
Hearing of Munro’s death sent me back to this, her first book, winner of the Governor General’s Award in 1968. One of my favorite authors, Munro wrote short stories exclusively, forcing her to master the art of compression. Even these early stories demonstrate—to my delight—the kind of concise writing we expect in poetry. Munro is lauded for capturing the life of small towns in rural Ontario, drawing on her experience of growing up in one such town where she was born in 1931. As Hermione Lee writes in the New York Review:
Munro’s “real life” ingredients become enormously familiar to us: the childhood in the fox farm on the edge of town, the mother with incurable Parkinson’s, the studious girl reading her way out of the country into university, the expectations for young women in 1940s and 1950s provincial, conservative, colonial Canada; the early marriage and motherhood in Vancouver, the condescending young husband, the adultery, the divorce, the deaths of her parents, the returns home.
Yet even when I come across some of these familiar details, each story feels new to me and each character a new and different person. She establishes the new character immediately, sometimes by starting in media res, sometimes by giving her an unmistakably original voice.
Afterwards the mother, Leona Parry, lay on the couch, with a quilt around her, and the women kept putting more wood on the fire although the kitchen was very hot, and no one turned the light on . . . “The Time of Death”
Now that Mary McQuade had come, I pretended not to remember her. It seemed the wisest thing to do. She herself said, “if you don’t remember me you don’t remember much.” “Images”
Setting and mood, as well, are deftly established with just a few sentences. Here, the narrator has returned to her hometown for a visit and is sitting on the steps with her sister Maddy in the quiet night.
At 10:30 a bus goes through the town, not slowing much; we see it go by at the end of our street. It is the same bus I used to take when I came home from college, and I remember coming into Jubilee on some warm night, seeing the earth bare around the massive roots of the trees, the drinking fountain surrounded by little puddles of water on the main street, the soft scrolls of blue and red and orange light that said Billiards and Café . . . “The Peace of Utrecht”
This story also illustrates why I value Munro’s work so highly. The tangled relationship between the two sisters, one who stayed to care for their aging mother and one who left, is the fire smoldering between lines laying out the events and memories, the encounters and discords. No story I’d read before this one truly captured the roiling emotions and testy skirmishes between sisters that I’d experienced. Munro is someone who gets me. Was.
Stories, such as “Boys and Girls” where the narrator rejects her mother’s homemaker-in-training chores to join the boys doing far more fun farmwork, speak to me childhood. Others could have been written about my life as a young mother. “The Office” begins:
The solution to my life occurred to me one evening while I was ironing a shirt. It was simple but audacious. I went into the living room where my husband was watching television and I said, “I think I ought to have an office.”
Girls and young women populate the stories in this first collection. I’ve read many of her later stories, which only get better, and now am looking forward to reading her last two books.
Have you read Alice Munro’s work? What is your favorite story?
I host a monthly poetry discussion group where we read and talk about the work of a single poet. These sessions give me, and others, a chance to explore the work of a variety of poets whom I might not otherwise have read, with the additional insight gained from everyone’s comments. As a poet myself, I have learned a lot about what different people look for in a poem, what they notice or find appealing, how they interpret certain lines. Lingering on a single poem for a time also encourages me to stay with a poem when I am reading alone and make the effort to draw back the layers, instead of reading quickly and moving on.
This month we read poems by Richard Wilbur. I’d heard of him: a famous twentieth century poet, he was the second poet laureate of the United States and won the Pulitzer Prize twice, the National Book Award, and many other awards and honors. However, I’d never read his work.
Known for using traditional patterns of rhyme and meter and for optimistic themes, his work fell out of favor in the 1960s and 1970s when confessional poetry and free verse became more popular. Eventually, though, the pendulum swung back again, combined with his own tendency toward more personal poems as he grew older. That was when he won his second Pulitzer and was nominated as poet laureate.
A good example of traditional form is Black Birch in Winter, with four quatrains and an AABB rhyme scheme in each. Some people were distracted by the rhymes, but we all liked the careful description of the rough bark and the way he compared it to “mosaic columns in a church” and “the trenched features of an aged man.” Trenched! We found many examples of fresh and surprising uses of familiar words as we went through the poems.
The final stanza lifted the poem into the realm of the extraordinary, where he reminds us that despite their “shriveled skin,” these trees are still “doomed to annual rebirth.”
And this is all their wisdom and their art-
To grow, stretch, crack, and not yet come apart.
As I age myself, I know I will return to these lines.
Another poem that surprised me was The Death of a Toad. Caught by a power mower, the toad manages to get to the garden and hid under the cinera leaves. While on one level the scene is about the conflict of humans with nature, on another it makes me consider our own vulnerability; a catastrophe can come out of nowhere and disrupt our destiny and all our plans. Even more, the author’s close observation of the toad and its decline reminds me to pay attention, always, no matter how trivial the subject.
We were all stunned into silence by Cottage Street, 1953, which describes a meeting over tea between Sylvia Plath and the author, hosted by Edna Ward. Ward was Wilbur’s mother-in-law who was friends with Plath’s mother, who is also present at the tea party. Did it really happen or only imagined? Doesn’t matter. What comes across so powerfully is his own humility and shame that having been invited to help her, save her, he finds himself impotent. And the two women, Edna and Sylvia, and the choices they made.
Wilbur’s most anthologised poem, Love Calls Us to the Things of This World, begins during hypnagogia, that is, the moment between sleeping and waking, before consciousness and rational thought fully take over. With images of angels and laundry and nuns, the author explores the interface between body and soul and ends with “keeping their difficult balance.”
I’m grateful for the opportunity to dig into this author’s work, and for the assistance of my fellow poetry lovers. There are so many poets and so much poetry, yet we can explore them one poet at a time, one poem at a time.
I’m always thrilled to stumble across an inspiring story based on real events, a story that’s been lost to history. In 1865, the Civil War is over, but freedom has only worsened the lives of former slaves. On the Montgomery Plantation, twenty-four-year-old Louella Bobo carries the trauma of her years as a slave: her mother being sold away, her father lynched, and beatings that have scarred her back and soul.
She hates, with all her being, and cannot find room in her heart for love, even for William, the older preacher who loves her. Still, she knows he is a good man and agrees to marry him. She knows what she wants: to make real her vision of a Happy Land where people can live freely and be treated with respect. She envisions a cooperative community, where everything is shared so that all can prosper.
When events make it impossible to stay on the plantation, Louella and William lead a group of former slaves to find a place to settle and build their community. They travel for months, encountering dangers and surprising succor in the post-Civil War South, eventually settling in the Carolinas. Louella and William are appointed Queen and King of Happy Land. It thrives, growing to 500 families, but internal friction develops and threatens all they’ve built.
Miller’s fictionalised version of this true story captures the drama of Louella’s terrible journey from hate to love. The injustice and outright abuse can be hard to read about, but will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with slavery and Reconstruction. Another aspect that can be off-putting but not unexpected for someone of the time is Louella’s devout Christianity. While no doubt historically accurate, Louella constantly excusing injustice by saying that God has His ways or hoping God would hear her need seemed to take all the air out of the story.
Luckily she often speaks her mind and finds creative ways to accomplish her goals. Such parts kept the story moving. By having Louella take the lead and speak her mind, Miller shows us a complex character. Each of the characters—and there are a lot—is fully depicted as an individual.
Given the egalitarian nature of Happy Land, I was uncomfortable with the titles of king and queen, especially since they were used as day-to-day nomenclature, i.e., referring to King William or the King and Louella likewise. Of course, this is one of the dangers of using real events for a novel. The author shouldn’t go against the actual historical record.
Having just read Erasure, a novel of how the public and the publishing industry only want and will only accept one view of The Black Experience, I appreciated this portrait of a harmonious and loving marriage as well as that of a thriving community.
The part I enjoyed most was the building of the Happy Land: how Louella managed to negotiate what they needed, the ways they found to make the money they needed, and the success of their communal sharing of all resources.
The book’s language is fairly simple; in fact, I wondered if it wasn’t a Middle Grade or Young Adult novel, though the traumatic violence rules out Middle Grade. However, it’s an easy read and an immensely valuable addition to our understanding of the time and also of what one woman can accomplish. She had a dream, and she made it come true.
What novel have you read that was based on real events?
