Rena Gerhard began writing poetry as a child in the 1940s. Later, many of her poems were published in Musings, the poetry column in her local newspaper, The Reading Eagle. She continued to write until her death in 2014. Now her son and fellow poet Fred Gerhard has issued a selection of her work from all these phases of her life.
With such a breadth of time, the reader can see how her style developed as she matured while also recognising how she retained the elegant simplicity and emotional impact of her earlier work. Some consistent themes emerge.
Many of the poems are suffused with her love of nature and its rhythms, such as in “Night Walk” in which she describes a maple tree as “sleeping standing up / Having dreamed her children / to the wind.”
Alive to the magic of childhood, she speaks of the moon in “Midnight Forest.”
That whispering sigh above your head,
Know you what it means?
A rustling leaf—long brown and dead
Or th’ song of Fairy Queens.
Other poems are drawn from daily life, such as “Supper Will Be Late.” Or “Mystery” whose two lines capture a moment we can identify with: “Don’t you just hate when you clean out a drawer / And not all things fit that fit before!” The humor here can be found in many of the poems. One of my favorites is “Dancers” which begins:
Dinosaurs dance sedately.
Because of their weight and their delicate toes,
Their walnut-sized brains and their clattering clothes,
Dinosaurs dance sedately.
Subsequent stanzas continue the fun. As a dancer myself, I perk up every time she refers to dancing in a poem. When you take to the floor and begin moving to the music, you have to feel the rhythm in your body. Rena’s dance experience is evident in the confident rhythms she chooses for her poems.
Her imagery, too, is surprising and fresh, such as when she describes a light snow as “heirloom lace” spread over a “tablecloth world.” She continues the motif with “Finest stitch of sparrow hops / link bush to branch to porch to perch” and “Squirrel-leap and rabbit dart / basting stitch the path of paws.”
You can see her love of words in poems like “Absurd” where she says, “What a wonderful word! / A laugh that bursts / Like water balloons.”
Although I never met Rena, I feel I have a sense of her based on her humor and love of nature as well as her sure handling of concision and emotion in these poems. In “Poem to Old Writings” she looks back over her life and is grateful to be reminded of who she used to be and whom she has become. I’m grateful to her son for sharing these poems.
Have you ever looked at a poet’s collected work and considered what has changed over time and what has stayed the same?