Baltimore area's thriving poetry

Verse of the region

Just below the surface of awareness in Baltimore, words and emotions coaslesce into something quite incredible: the local poetry scene. Who is emerging as Poetry Month 2003 begins?

Fittingly, the first poem in Elizabeth Spires' new book, Now The Green Blade Rises (Norton, 80 pages, $21.95), chronicles a visit to Robert Frost's Ripton, Vt., cabin. Not only does this poem harbinger the Frostian influence within many of her poems (in particular "Two Chairs on a Hillside"), but in its ending lines -- The wind, / is picking up, moving the trees softly to whisper, Ssshh! / A spider on your shoe is listening to all you say -- it rightly prepares us for the poetic voice of Spires, one that is almost a whisper, but just above.

Many of the poems respond to her mother, alive and dying, of whom she realizes: Everything was yours for the taking, / the pale wisteria, a bloom off the dogwood, / diffuse and free and calm as a mind / that spends itself completely on its blossoming and for whom she wishes Now, if I could, I would sit / with you in a simple pew / somewhere quiet and dim. / To be there would be enough. / There'd be nothing we'd have to say. / The moment, held like a book / between us, a silent offering.

Reflectively, this poet -- I sat for a while on a fallen log / the sun slanting through the trees the way / it does in late fall, / warming one cheek, / leaving the other in shadow... ("Chapel in the Woods") -- ends her fifth volume of poetry with "In Heaven It Is Always Autumn," a lovely homage to the generosity of poet Josephine Jacobsen.

Two recent books -- Hero-Surfing (Washington Writers' Publishing House, 64 pages, $12) by Anne Sheldon and The Porcelain Apes of Moses Mendelssohn (Milkweed Editions, 66 pages, $14.95) by Jean Nordhaus -- continue, with differing results, the extensive poetic heritage of storytelling that many feared threatened by the self-referential or confessional poem.

Sheldon's poems drift through mostly formal confines -- rhyme, slant rhyme, form -- all methodically comforting. Sometimes the poems, heavy with historical fact, are slight -- poems condensed into sound bites of history. The historical snippets that form the 24 poems of the "Lancastrian Letters" seem to want expansion into fiction rather than compression by poetry.