A Connecticut Yankee Comes to the Eastern Shore

by Bill Peak

Poetry is a funny thing. Really, it’s a shape-shifter. I’m a little slow when it comes to poems. I can only read one at a time, and can only do that when I have the time to really give the poem the attention it deserves—which sadly, even in retirement, seems to happen less and less often these days. That “shape-shifter” remark is the result of Sue Ellen Thompson’s poem The Nest, published in her most recent book, Sea Nettles (811.54 Thom).

I read The Nest for the first time, I don’t know, maybe a week or two ago. Sitting by the fire, a glass of bourbon on the table beside me, I made my way through its three simple verses and was pleased. The first and third verses were spot on, but I sort of slid over the second. On the whole, I thought it a good poem, if perhaps not one of Sue Ellen’s best. I am a big Sue Ellen Thompson fan. She is far and away one of my favorite poets.

But I also know myself well enough not to trust a first reading. Even mid-poem my mind can wander and I miss something important. Maybe it’s the bourbon. Anyway, last night I gave The Nest a second chance. And I thank the nine muses that I did.

The poem concerns something with which I am all too familiar these days: aging—a pair of older friends, husband and wife. He is just out of the hospital and visibly reduced by his illness. She is worried, attentive. That second verse I blew over in my first reading ends with a sentence describing the wife:

My brain’s voice-over tends toward exclamation, and this line elicited an unqualified “Oh my God!” I mean where do poets come up with analogies like that? Who would ever think to compare the damage fear can effect upon a well-preserved beauty to a silver serving dish? But isn’t it perfect? I mean think about the women you’ve known who have lived long enough and loved well enough to know what losing the love of their life will cost them. For that matter, think about the men.

A silver serving dish battered by knives. I’d give my left arm to come up with a simile like that, and I coasted right over it on my first reading, missed it entirely. Shape-shifters indeed.

Though I suspect Sue Ellen will always be a New Englander at heart (and there is, I believe, something austere and flinty about her writing that, to my Southern ear, smacks of the Northeast), she has now lived in Talbot County for almost twenty years. And anyone who’s ever swum in the Chesapeake will recognize in the title of her latest book the influence our region now holds upon her as well. But what a gift it is to have a poet of her accomplishments living here. Her readings at the Avalon, her lectures at the Talbot County Free Library, the classes she teaches—she has enriched our lives.

Not too long ago I shot Sue Ellen an email extolling Jane Hirshfield’s poetry and thanking her for introducing me to that wonderful writer. Sue Ellen, ever generous, replied that Hirshfield is, in her opinion, an “essential poet”. I love that phrase, that idea, that there are poets out there that are essential, necessary, like oxygen or water.

In her anthology, The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (811.508 AUTU), Sue Ellen has introduced me to any number of “essential poets”—Doug Anderson, Hayden Carruth, Robert Hass, Maxine Kumin, Sharon Olds, and Jane Kenyon come immediately to mind. But there is of course another. The Eastern Shore holds many treasures, but surely one of them is Sue Ellen Thompson.

On Monday, April 14, at 6 p.m. in the Easton branch of the Talbot County Free Library, Sue Ellen will present a combination lecture/reading she’s entitled Writing About Family. If you know her poetry, I’m sure you have been struck—as I have been—by how candidly and unflinchingly Sue Ellen writes about those she loves. I am very much looking forward to hearing how she manages to handle such volatile material without damaging the very relationships she seeks to honor.

Oh, and don’t forget: April is National Poetry Month. See you in the 800s!