Catherine Hunter launches a powerful new collection of poetry
Tue. Sep. 3, 2019
On April 11, 2019, U of W English Professor Catherine Hunter launched her fourth book of poetry, St. Boniface Elegies (Signature Editions), to a packed house at McNally Robinson. In four sections, St. Boniface Elegies traces a poet’s relationships with her family and her community through poems about travel, love, illness, work, and the writing life. Catherine Hunter has also published a novella and four novels, most recently the critically acclaimed After Light (Signature Editions).
In a series of poems that engage with poetic tradition. Catherine Hunter plays with poetic forms, including a new invention: the cento sestina.
Catherine Hunter has selected the poems below to share with us.
Romance
I miss you. Sparrows gather at the feeder, spill
seeds and gossip, plant a field of sunflowers
in the middle of the lawn. Suddenly, your bicycle,
still locked to the fencepost where you left it, crashes
to the ground, and all the birds take flight.
The bike lies sideways, one wheel spinning.
Meanwhile, you're five miles from here,
shuffling through hospital corridors, attached
by rubber tubes to an IV pole, an astronaut
too loosely tethered to the ship. When I said
you should go wireless, you laughed. You stood
at the window, six floors above the street and waved
goodbye. Radiation, says the doctor, is just sunlight.
She tells us how precisely they will aim the beam
into your brain. Long ago, my fourth-grade teacher said
the sun is ninety-three million miles away, and we can never
escape the atmosphere of Earth because of gravity.
Now they're sending cameras out on rocket ships.
Today the Curiosity beamed home an image of the dark
sand dunes of Mars, sunlit as our backyard garden.
Beauty, said Keats, is all we need to know,
but we weren't listening. Here on Earth, the black cat
circles the honeysuckle, tangling her leash eight times
around the branches, and though it's daylight, I can see
the three-quarter moon through the cottonwood branches,
a skim-milk moon, a pale suburban joke, and I can't believe
we ended up living out here, among the landscaped lawns
and stuccoed bungalows, where we said we'd never even visit,
where the mallards criticize the neighbour's hot tub,
and a squirrel on the high wire launches a complaint—
his debut appearance on Facebook, ruined
when he was misidentified as a chipmunk. Do you ever
wonder how we end up where we are? On Earth, or Mars,
or even farther, light years from the ninety-three
million miles that, way back when, seemed deeper
than a brain could go.
--Catherine Hunter, St. Boniface Elegies, Signature Editions, 2019
The Haunting
But when you feel longing, sing of women in love;
for their famous passion is still not immortal. Sing
of women abandoned and desolate (you envy them, almost)
who could love so much more purely than those who were gratified.
--from Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell.
Who, if I cried out, might pluck me from this dark
suburban solitude? George Bowering is no comfort
at such moments. As for those who haunt the bookcase—Rilke,
Milosz, Shelley, Yeats, Neruda, Mandelstam—all night
they're wide awake, though dead, rehearsing
ars poeticas and importuning muses in the air above
my bed. Gentlemen, go right ahead. When you write
of valour, speak of blood; when you engage in argument,
deploy that cold articulation you're so certain of.
But when you feel longing, sing of women in love;
for nothing moves you so like female pain, nothing pulls
the music from your throats like women's mourning.
Otherwise, there's just the void--inscrutable scrim of stars,
that one tree on the hill. And Rilke, as you've said, our minds
can't apprehend the world of animals, or angels, or the dead
(though you're longing to be crushed by mighty wings),
worlds where meanings come apart like untied strings. Poets,
begin with simple praise. Quote the sky, the voices of the wind.
But if you aspire to greatness, sing of women suffering,
for their famous passion is still not immortal. Sing
to glorify us for posterity, as only you guys can. Dear Rilke,
can we say who turned to whom, tonight? When gripped
by wild insomnia, I opened up your books and hoped
to unlock sleep. Instead, I found there words that deepened
my own grief. And when I rose to sort the midnight laundry,
wash my absent husband's socks, you followed, taking notes
on wifely chores, the pitch and pulse of female loneliness.
Was this how you practiced to describe those numinous figurines
who glide across the landscape of Lament? The beautiful ghosts
of women abandoned and desolate (you envy them, almost).
You envy them their full completion, which you envision as a love
that soars above all things. But brother, I forgive your male imaginings.
Let us each compose our elegies, you on the windy bastions of Duino
Castle, me in the coffee shop of St. Boniface General Hospital. Let
my ordinary language live between your lines. For what I'm losing,
I am losing here, on Earth, not in those other worlds, that other side
where you have so poetically dissolved. Leave me my imperfect troubles,
my empty bungalow, my dusty books. Go after what you really want:
the women with clean pain, the mothers of heroes, the widowed brides,
who could love so much more purely than those who were gratified.
--Catherine Hunter, St. Boniface Elegies, Signature Editions, 2019.