Essay |

Life’s Work: on the Poetry of Jane Mead

Jane Mead brought her five full-length books of poetry, together with an early, out-of-print chapbook and 14 new poems, into an enormous volume, To the Wren: Collected & New Poems, 1991-2019. She died less than a month after its August 2019 publication.  Accounting for the life’s work of any serious poet makes for a daunting task; doing justice to the work of a life cut short requires especially delicate assessments.  Given such circumstances, some loved ones still in mourning, how best to leaven genuine appreciation — especially for the work’s formal variety: narratives, lyrics, sequences, epigrams, free verse, fixed forms, and fixed-form ghostings — with the reservations 550 pages of poetry will inevitably provoke?

One could do worse than begin somewhat short of in medias res, with these eerily proleptic lines from “To Break the Spell Is to Invite Chaos into the Universe” that inaugurate House of Poured-Out Waters, Mead’s second book, published in 2001:

 

It would be easier

if I did not exist—

 

but I did.  It would be

easier if there were

 

nothing left, but there is —

 

In a body of work as restlessly diverse as Mead’s, there’s no point trying to identify a “characteristic” style.  Still, these seemingly artless lines exhibit a quality that recurs in manifold ways throughout her poetry — one might call it “invisible craft,” except that it’s not invisible.  None of the typical devices in this poet’s toolkit — sensory detail, image, metaphor, sonic intensity — go into constructing this passage.  Instead, Mead uses the most basic of verbal apparatus — grammar — beginning with mood and tense.  In the first line, the subjunctive “would be” puts the longed-for easiness out of reach.  In terse simple past tense, the second line unmasks the nihilism of the wish.  The passage’s coup de théâtre follows the dash: instead of the expected present tense — “but I do” —  the reader meets “but I did” — the past tense placing the speaker among the nonexistent.  A reprised and new subjunctive — “would be”  and “if there were” — further undermine the odds for ease, before the lines resolve in the present-tense assertion, “but there is.” Paradox inheres in this resolution: the present-tense verb of being points to the “nothing left” that precedes it, confirming the stark reality of nonbeing.  A home-grown riff on Stevens’s “nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is,” the passage plumbs an aporia and murmurs eureka. With no showing, all telling — and distinctly Williamsesque despite having no things but in ideas — these lines captivate not just by their self-effacing candor, but also because of Mead’s subtle adjustments to the semantic and grammatical DNA of language.  (That the poem then veers into a refractory seascape, replete with cliffs and mud and swallows, is beside the point; or at least beside mine.)

Philip Levine chose Mead’s first collection, The Lord and the General Din of the World (1996), for Sarabande Books’ Katherine A. Morton Award, and one can imagine his attraction to a book that begins as full-frontally as this—

 

Jesus, I am cruelly lonely

and I do not know what I have done

nor do I suspect that you will answer me. . .

 “Concerning the Prayer I Cannot Make”

 

— as well as his taste for narrative (presumably autobiographical) as relentlessly seen as this:

 

This morning I found

a used needle in the empty box

marked produce in the empty

icebox, sponged the blood speck

from the tip.  The fog pushed at the windows

with a sickening heave.  I picked

another moth from the drain.

“Fall”

 

Its stylistic norms inherited from Imagism via Confessionalism, this writing in fact sounds a bit like Levine’s own; and, by and large, the book’s subjects — addiction (her father’s and her own), a family history of guns loaded, cocked, and sometimes fired, and bouts with mental illness — resemble the home turf surveyed by Levine’s protégés (Larry Levis, Sharon Olds, and Jeffrey Skinner come to mind).  But Levine’s lifelong stylistic voiceprint — in later years a habit of speaking—Mead at her best adapts as one of many accents.  Style, for her, constitutes a range of dialects, changing as she changes location and life circumstances.

What these early poems most usefully learn from her precursors is a way of combining a blunt naturalism with sensuous lyricism.  Having spent much of her adolescence at Mead Ranch, her family’s Napa Valley vineyard, Mead can tease our senses pleasingly, even as she paints harsh moral landscapes:

 

I want you to tell the truth —

our faces were not beautiful.

Truth is, you fired five shots

and we scattered. Behind the stone

pillar between the vineyard

and the house I thought, that night,

of how you taught us, years ago,

to stand quietly among the vines,

to close our eyes and listen

with our feet to the sound

of grapes growing.  I listened

but didn’t hear them, father. . .

 “On the Lawn at the Drug Rehab Center”

 

On the one hand, the gunfire of painful fact; on the other, the beguiling synesthetic beauty of listening through one’s foot-soles.  This decoupling and recoupling of the Keatsian equation persists in scores of Mead’s descriptions, from the grounds of Glen’s Garage in “After Detox” — with its beautiful/horrible “maps/Of stars on the windshields where heads have smashed” — to “The Man in the Poetry Lounge,” where the man of the title — omnisciently observed imbibing English pastoral poetry “with passive/abandon” (another nod to Keats) — vies for attention with the speaker’s runny nose.  In a capaciously distracted meditation, nightingales (more Keatsiana) call up unwelcome images of the WW I bloodbaths at Flanders and Picardy, until the speaker escapes this unsettling lounge. Stopping short at a street-side veteran selling Flanders poppies — Keats and Owen co-joined in two words — she’s caught staring, but “not, / of course, looking at his left leg — //because I can’t.  / Because it’s not there.”  A cleared-eyed tour of the pastoral tradition runs aground on the phantom limb of history.

Another quality in this first book that distinguishes Mead from poets who grew up on Levine is her comedic self-irony, which deflates self-aggrandizement (a pitfall Levine didn’t always skirt; he could be funny, but only on occasion at his own expense).  “Passing a Truck Full of Chickens at Night on Highway Eighty” captures Mead’s absurdist streak, which culminates — the speaker so struck by the bearing of one Gallinacean captive that she “linger[s] there beside her for five miles” — in the final stanzas:

 

She had pushed her head through the space

between bars — to get a better view.

She had the look of a dog in the back

 

of a pickup. That eager look of a dog

who knows she’s being taken along.

She craned her neck.

 

She looked around, watched me, then

strained to see over the car — strained

to see what happened beyond.

 

That is the chicken I want to be.

 

At least two sorts of comedy are at play here:  a chicken motivated to improve its view, manifesting that doggy eagerness we know so well; and most pricelessly, the implied given that it’s only natural to vet a pool of chicken candidates before selecting one as role model. The surpassingly unlyrical last line concludes not just the poem but the book.  It takes guts to end a first book — especially one as ferociously intimate as The Lord and the General Din of the World —with a punchline. Hard not to picture her editor demurring; easy to imagine Mead sticking to her guns.

Someone very different than the speaker in this first book says most of the poems in House of Poured-Out Waters.  A handful of prismatic narratives harken back to the earlier work:  a fractured recollection of self-harm (“Rather a Pale Occasion for Flowers”); an exasperated stab at describing city pigeons without “artsy” distortion (“Point of Departure”); the time-warping “The Ring Around the Reappearing Body,” which braids six narratives, one the story of its own composition; and finally, the fugal “Problem Performed by Shadows,” its six repeated end-words covering thirteen tercets to impersonate a distended sestina.

But this sophomore book introduces a new sort of writing, which employs metaphor much more sparingly and often airbrushes even dimly discernable geographical or psychological locations.  A further analogy from the visual arts might best apply:  these poems resemble cubist still-lives (or sequences of cubist still-lives) of the imperceptible present tense:

 

Look early, look late.

Look up to fate —

magnify the moment.

 

Get the gist of it —

magnify the gist of it. —

Where the owl complains.

“Lack, the Owl”

 

Never wasting words, hypnotic as canticles, these innovations sometimes strike me as circles drawn around an absent center.  While the sheer open-heartedness of “To Break the Spell Is to Invite Chaos into the Universe” humanizes its spare rhetoric, other short lyrics, or parts of the book’s seven sequences, call to mind Berryman’s complaint against Stevens’s “metaphysics / . . . hefted up until we could not breathe/the physics”:

 

THE WORLD

 

remaining central, there is

some knowledge we do not

debate: a child is born

 

to his body the day he is

born, for example, or

the sky’s felt time

 

seems like mourning:

the grasshoppers are anonymous

to the anonymous, the birds

 

are always at attendance.

There comes a moment

when you see as the crow sees:

 

the body as a slaughterhouse,

as beggar—in the long grass, kneeling.

 

I don’t want to linger on a minor effort by an excellent poet, but along with its generically reverential tone, an uncharacteristic laxness perplexes.  On the one hand, that “a child is born/to his body the day he is/born” seems to me quite debatable; on the other, if severing the umbilical inaugurates biological autonomy, then the claim borders on the self-evident.  What does “the sky’s felt time” mean?  As for the grasshoppers’ anonymity, I’d chalk it up to an absence of Mead’s typically fresh noticings. Finally, don’t birds sleep?  Some will object that such literal-minded objections ignore the poem’s metaphysics.   In that case, Berryman rests my case.

One of the book’s centerpieces, “But What Is, As Is” — a single sentence distributed over seventeen quatrains—makes extraordinary demands on the reader (or at least this reader), offering both palpable rewards and a few nagging dissatisfactions.  It begins as a witty takeoff on the epistemological poser we learn in grade school:

 

BUT WHAT IF, AS IS

 

often the case, it takes

months, years even, for that

specific tree to finish

falling, and furthermore,

 

all dying that time

lots of birds nest

in that tree, and the tree

and the bird call each other

 

into existence, mutually …

 

A layered series of counterfactuals, punctuated by four further what ifs, the poem widens into cosmic skepticism about our centrality in a “spectacularly//uncentered universe”; personifies its conceit’s setting as the tree “creak[s] / in the whispering wind … waiting / for the song of eleven strong/rains, a magic number of fogs” (in one stanza, a duck paddling shoreward from a parallel universe confronts Zeno’s Dichotomy Paradox); then darkens into personal memory, as a falling branch “hits its neighbor’s branch,/sounding like a distant .22.”   It’s here that the poem most decisively turns, introducing a first-person speaker, whose harrowing past we recognize from The Lord and the General Din of the World.  Once “the guns of my childhood” occupy the poem, the traumas of that childhood follow, “called with me into existence, // meaning back into existence, / and another memory tags along.”  But what is that other memory trying to keep up like a kid sibling?  Mead doesn’t say.  In the final ten lines of the poem’s what might have been, the fully first-person speaker wonders why memory can’t “all add up, the trees, the moss, / the puny cracking, to me,” after which a formerly unseen “you” invades the poem, brusquely dismissed as “a problem / for another day.” In its psychologically most potent move, this reference to the erstwhile hidden interlocutor immediately defers him out of the poem.  The speaker grabs a last chance to interrogate an escape route from this vexed I/Thou entanglement with a jarring parting shot:

 

 . . . what brand

 

of confusion would it take

for what manner of pervert to ask

that particular question

of a potentially invisible child?

 

Over sixty-eight lines, a what-if-a-tree-falls-in-the-woods brand of naiveté wanders into a creepy first-degree that a sexual deviant inflicts on a child — a pedophilic version of Eliot’s “overwhelming question.”  The distance traveled is breathtaking.  Yet the comp teacher in me can’t help asking — as he did with the toddling memory — What was the question?”  The poem poses approximately nine discrete queries, none akin to — let alone candidates for — the sexually tainted particular question invoked but unspecified in the penultimate line.  Without context, then, “pervert” blurts like a shriek during a group meditation.  The poem’s syntactical labyrinth of interrogations is indeed perverse, but perverted? The reader is left quizzing the question; and perhaps that’s the point:  memory, particularly of trauma, branches out in a tangle of endless deferrals.  The target of inquiry must never be identified, much less cross-examined, and the best the child, young or adult, can do to protect herself is to go invisible. I leave “But What Is, As Is” — and House of Poured-Out Waters as a whole — with mixed feelings.  An ambitious and resourceful departure from a stunning debut, the collection evinces the restiveness of transitional work as much as a fully realized accomplishment.

Mead’s authority comes roaring back in The Usable Field (2008), a book permeated by the elegiac after her father’s death in 2003, although he’s explicitly mentioned only once.  Moreover, although it’s occasioned by her return to Mead Ranch — which she’ll tend henceforth with longtime managers and Mexican immigrants Ramon and Silvia Rodriguez — The Usable Field departs further from overt occasion, fully invested in what Ashbery called “this leaving out business.” Instead, Mead’s acute auditory imagination finds psalmic incantation more resonant than narrative linearity. “This is some chant I’m working at,” the speaker declares in “To Whatever Remains,” that unassuming “some” providing the line’s main event of language: the chant is both one among many and a chant, indeed.  The foreknowledge provided by the book’s memorial dedication helps anchor passages where a central emotion might otherwise escape us.  Mordancies like “In the high and mighty grasses,/the dead lean on the living/like nobody’s business” pack more punch when the departed are understood as paternal in their neediness.  This tercet epitomizes another attractive aspect of Mead’s maturity: the capacity to extract fresh truths from truisms — in this case, the insouciance to dis the deceased with two brazenly dead metaphors produces an ornery critique of the pretensions of elegy.

The conspicuous absence of Mead’s father also makes cameo appearances in the book’s network of lacunae and termini: the “rain-flattened” grass that “may not re-spring” and “the heron on the sandbar//[that] does not answer” in “And Then the Smoke”; and nature’s negative spaces in “We Take the Circus to Another Level” — “No blue jay in the pepper tree, no/crocus blossoming on the compost, and most steadfastly,//no rye-grass-swaying-in-breezes. No breezes.”  “There/is only one road/home, and it is not/for you,” the speaker says curtly in “Woods Hole,” leaving the identity of “you” unknown.  Unfinished paintings; companionless day walks; injunctions to “send//the dead away, one by one”; a fantasized dive down to “the bottom of music,” only to find “a phrase is missing” — this procession of voids culminates (or crumbles) in a sliver as poignant in its gaps as a Sapphic fragment:

 

WAS LIGHT

 

at the bottom

there, tomorrow, —

 

else where I

missed it?  And

 

where I missed it?

 

If “the mechanism/of grief supplies no answer” (“We Take the Circus to Another Level”), perhaps only broken little word machines can articulate that grief in all its disrepair.  Aptly, one of the book’s end-notes references Paul Celan.

I can’t leave The Usable Field without some remarks on its final and most ambitious poem, “Where in the Story the Horse Mazy Dies.”  A sequence in eight parts, its music and metaphors largely inherited (not borrowed) from Roethke, the poem plays variations, both melodic and atonal, on Mead’s distinguishing themes.  I’ll mention just four gleaned from many.  The poetry of earth will outlive all the time-bound styles that humans invent.  Like any Eden, an idealized childhood lies, albeit sustainingly.  Language, despite its dead ends, remains humankind’s best medium for reason and conjecture.  On the other hand, why write “the delicate engine” of poetry if not to say outlandish things?  And it’s on the level of language (outlandish and landish) that the poem most charms, restoring to The Usable Field the sensory textures abjured in pages of disembodied minimalism.  The poem refracts its “twiggy stuff” (Williams again) through synesthesia, surrealism, and the “logic of strange position” (Ashbery again), but some of it is spot-on naturalistic.  My single favorite line in the poem may be “the tillage in its earnest rows of clot,” the tension between estrangement and recognition in the last word stemming from its Anglo-Saxon common ancestors, clod and clay.  Here’s the section that integrates the poem’s title, by turns mimetic and psychedelic, but always kinetic:

 

At Big Creek, celestial creaking — canopy light,

world greening and the river-white sound.

I knew no lullabies but sang her story

 

where in the story the horse Mazy dies —

where she would go, what hope unfolding,

what mind concluding down around her.

 

Forage the wet forage. Forage the dry.

She was a bit of birdsong her stubborn self —

in rule of point of passage, in point of being.

 

And the skinny cow-faced dog is rat now

and the grassy puddles tremble in the rain.

 

This writing is difficult to understand but easy to love, as Jarrell said of Frost’s “Directive,” a distinction that defines poetry as exactly as any I know.

Better yet, “Where in the Story the Horse Mazy Dies” recharges Mead’s sense of humor: “In the era of postmodern and maybe//the mammals still strike up friendships,” quips the first section; in the next-to-last, “we are not a spectator sport, say the chickens.”  (Mead’s chickens amuse as much as O’Connor’s peacocks.)  Sometimes threatening to spill over into word salad (and, yes, sometimes spilling over), but with hardly a moment unfueled by imagination, the poem’s succession of stanzas without a point of arrival—an impression reinforced by ampersands dividing each section—reminds me of Heather McHugh’s retort when asked what her poetry was “about”: “It’s not about About.”  “Where in the Story the Horse Mazy Dies” isn’t, either.  I suppose it could be construed, or misconstrued, as an elegy to Mazy, but I prefer to read it as kicking up its heels before closing the door on Mead’s most engrossingly agitated collection to date.

Mead’s next collection, eccentrically titled Money Money Money / Water Water Water (2014), represents her most sustained poetic treatment of the fate of the Earth.  Mead’s reputation as an ecopoet rests largely on this book.  The laconic opening poem puts the book’s title — which sounds like a schoolyard taunt — into play, doing so with such limpidity, it merits a solo:

 

MONEY

 

Someone had the idea of getting more water

released beneath the San Pedro Dam

into the once-green Tuolumne,—

 

so the minnows could have some wiggle room,

so the salmon could lunge far enough up

to spawn, so there would be more salmon

 

in the more water below the dam.

But it wasn’t possible — by then the water

didn’t belong to the salmon anymore, by then

 

the water didn’t even belong to the river.

The water didn’t belong to the water.

 

Tough on the conscience but not hectoring, “Money” epitomizes the plain-style Mead-manner I love best (though I like her antics too).  A thoroughgoing poem of political witness, it has Amichai’s restraint (“They amputated your leg …”) and Miłosz’s confidentiality (“I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder …”).  It’s a note Mead sounds regularly, if not frequently, throughout To the Wren, in succinct one-pagers like “Bach, Winter”; “And All These Things Are So”; “What Happens”; “However”; “I Have Been Living”; “Some Days”; “And Then the Smoke”; and “Gift Horizon” (to name just eight I’d stitch into a fascicle and carry with me).

As a whole, Money Money Money / Water Water Water is a big, weird book. The poems everywhere speak out of a deep ecological conscience — nearly always transcending pastoral clichés — but they’re rarely as direct as “Money.” Mead appears to require even more intensely compressed obliquity to marry her wonder at the natural world with her powerful and occasionally overpowering rage at its destruction.  These fractured (and perhaps fracked?) outcries against the denaturing of Nature can be very moving, precisely because the faltering sentence fragments and outbursts convey a stunned loss for words:

 

Thirty caves dug into

the hillside, unforgiving

 

repertoire of chipping.  Then

ceiling roots as new beginnings:

Then just who-so-ever,

 

and so-on and so-forth

all over again.  Whomsoever

as the Earth’s rattled

 

inheritance.  Seedpods!

“Human of the First Forgiven”

 

Throughout the book, Mead deploys a curious structural device to figure forth “the rattled inheritance” our dying planet has bequeathed.  Four-line, italicized fragments placed at the bottom of the verso pages — found poems, notes from Mead’s reading, stray jottings — intervene between each titled poem.  Shunning the consoling wit of epigrams — their stanza structure always 3+1, as if quatrains would impose a false symmetry — they interrupt our reading like choked cries from under the rubble after an earthquake.  Here’s one of the direst: “I can’t hear the whisper / I can barely feel the breath / Elsewhere gnats drinking // Drinking from the eyes of children.”   In an interview, Mead calls them “a part of the conversation.”  Perhaps so.  I find them more powerful as epigrammatic eruptions.

In my favorite of the book’s three sequences, “The Cove,” Mead writes one of her most sonorously discordant poems, not so much pulling out the stops — her instrument is grander than a pipe organ — as dialing up a commotion of audio signals from some short-circuited synth.  By turns resigned (“if [the woods] want/anything it’s to be … allowed to die in peace”); barbed (“I’m no lover of human skin in any shade”); plaintive (“There ought to be a path with a promise”); mordant (“different leaves now. . . same big death”); bossy (“Now listen here”); self-deprecating (“But if I could tell you how to live//chances are I’d get drunk instead”); and even, occasionally, buoyant (“I like to watch things wobble”) — the tones in this nonsequential sequence clamor and wrangle, united only by Mead’s alarm at the mercantile greed and political chicanery vying to murder the planet.  Sometimes a line betrays a piercing irony that appears to elude the speaker herself: “Oh hell.  Have mercy on us.” Sometimes the seeming futility of action as “The world repeals itself” (from one of the verso epigrams) reduces diction to mumbling redundancy: “what we can / plainly see: the poisoned planet poisoning.”

The 33 poems following this tour-de-force include more of Mead’s runic psalms: “Maybe Later” is all deferred denotation; the syntactically impacted “Dying of Stupidity” stupefies indeed.  But others are as accessible as Whitman’s ample open door in “A Farm Picture.”  Always up for the runes, I’m more likely to revisit the doors. “Experience as Visitation,” a quasi-villanelle, incants the ineffable into announcing itself. “Fallen Leaf Lake,” an elegy to Mead’s grandfather, condenses the religious skepticism of Stevens’s “Sunday Morning” into eleven lines.  The sixty-nine clauses of Magna Carta get abridged and made lyrical in (what else?) “Magna Carta.” Perhaps most indelibly, this gem further instances Mead’s invisible craft:

 

THE GEESE

 

slicing this frozen sky know

where they are going —

and want to get there.

 

Their call, both strange

and familiar, calls

to the strange and familiar

 

heart, and the landscape

becomes the landscape

of being, which becomes

 

the bright silos and snowy

fields over which the nuanced

and muscular geese are calling.

 

Lazy readers — who peruse words, not poems — may flinch on first glance:  frozen, sky, call, strange, heart, landscape, being, and bright (not to mention the familiar familiar). Yes, these one-dollar words can frequently be found consorting — often in poems about geese!  But how these words partner makes for a clarity — indeed, a familiarity — that is itself a kind of mystery.  “Slicing” — not part of that commune of impoverished diction — must wait until “muscular” and “nuanced” to claim membership in a verbal collective.  That the geese “are going … to get there” a seeming tautology — tersely conveys the rudiments of instinct, a logic where/there clinches with true rhyme.   Another apparent redundancy — “their call … calls/to” — enacts the echo from animal nature’s soundings to human nature’s emotive answer.  In a poem so replete with repetitions, multiplying “strange and familiar” by two may register less as a risk than a mistake.  I don’t think so.  It’s hard to imagine a more economical way to evoke the mirror neurons of sympathetic response.  The second “familiar” connotes both the heart’s proximity to the body it sustains and its acquaintance with the call of the geese.  Especially moving is the way Mead stations (the Keatsian notion fits) the geese over a landscape equal parts human (“silos”) and natural (“fields”), while the euphony of their “nuanced/and muscular” slicing — the word’s sonic and semantic relevance now released — sings of both physical and metaphysical flight.  A final stationing —this one syntactical — gives the poem’s last word to “calling”: just right, as no other verb in the poem makes a sound.

Rereading To the Wren from half-title to colophon, I felt a special pathos when re-crossing the border between Mead’s three middle books and her last volume, World of Made and Unmade (2016), a book-length poem documenting her final days with her mother, returned from her pecan farm in Rincon, New Mexico to die at Mead Ranch.  After so much testing and teasing the limits of mimesis, this primal loss appears to have knocked the epistemological brinksmanship out of her, and so she writes her least antic but most intimate poetry since The Lord and the General Din of the World.  In this last book, Mead all but forswears metaphor’s transmuting vehicle on behalf of its anchored tenor: “like” occurs six times, only four of them to fashion a simile; I count about a dozen other metaphors.  Scenes are juxtaposed but almost never disjoined; skittery tonalities or enlivening digressions are banished.  Not only does she cultivate a scrupulous literalism — “dots of blood/speckle the back of her cotton nightgown” — but in her urge to record, as accurately as possible, what’s certain to be lost, she resorts to nonverbal modes of reproduction.  The book reprints her mother’s detailed sketches of fish, a page from her expense ledger, and a photograph of her with her brother from the 1930s.  The book’s every feature contributes to this aesthetic of the unembellished: “Day by day, I hum — // to the dog and the moon and the vineyard,  /  I guess, — Let  me see you more clearly.”  Of course, the diffident, even defeated enjambment, isolating and emphasizing “I guess,” shows how an unadorned style still constitutes a style.

Among the poem’s few details chosen for symbolic effect, the rotting corpse of a mouse (or maybe a rat or chipmunk) “start[s] the long haul into bone-dom” behind a filing cabinet. Given the just-the-facts atmosphere everywhere else, this single figure may tip the emblematic scales a touch too heavily.  Still, no reader will doubt the facticity of the rodent or the cabinet — or the rot, for that matter. More often, denotation sheds connotation, as word roots grudgingly shift their parts of speech to make a sentence — “the talkers talk” — and noun clauses stall at lethargic predicates: “the tumor on my mother’s liver/grows fast.”  Still, this minimalist idiom needed to covey impending death hasn’t weakened Mead’s penchant for saving ironies:

 

Hospice wants to interview the patient

 

But the patient says

I’m deaf and I’m blind and I’m not

Answering any more questions.

 

(The patient exaggerates.)

 

Nor will she miss the chance to unleash the good tidings of a bad pun: “Turns out Leo is one lying/thieving son-of-a-bitch pooch.” Her mother herself makes the best and grimmest joke: “ — Would you like to go to sleep now? / Yes, but only temporarily.”

Into this death-bed vigil, the outside world enters in two ways: first, the “shouts distant and nearing” of the workers who have maintained the vineyard, alongside Mead herself, for decades; caretaking changing her from coworker to witness, Mead misses the labor profoundly.  Second, in a series of cutaways, two sites appear in the peripheral vision of the vineyard’s death watch:  her mother’s farm, now closed; and Mexico — the perilous home country Ramon and Silvia haven’t foresworn but keep at a distance.  These complicating glimpses of lives beyond the routine of dying come to a head in two juxtaposed tercets:

 

Somewhere in New Mexico

the house that is always cracking

continues to crack—

 

Somewhere in Mexico a father

pays half the ransom and gets

half his daughter’s body back.

 

In the poem’s penultimate section, Mead and her sister administer a fatal cocktail of medications, and their mother dies over the course of twenty-five page-turning stanzas. In the final section, work and talk fill the gaps in the immediate aftermath; the siblings return to Rincon to scatter the ashes; and the conventional gestures of elegy — “the trees, formidable/and orderly are losing/their leaves” — bring the poem to a close.  Convention is precisely what survivors need.

The alpha and omega of Mead’s life’s work bookend To the Wren, which begins with “A Truck Marked Flammable,” a dramatic monologue recounting the misadventures of a psychiatric patient named Mario.  Perhaps an heir to Merwin’s drunk in the furnace, Mario makes his home in a dumpster adjacent to a hospital treating him, his academic promise in geometry long since derailed.  Published as a chapbook in 1991, this ambitious narrative brims with paradoxes of the sort Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead (sourced in a headnote) strove to banish from their mathematical theories.  Mario’s devotion to Euclid’s five geometric postulates both keeps him sane and drives him toward madness, his Road to Damascus moment of apostasy occurring near a Denny’s and involving a model glider.  Brilliantly hilarious at times, the story’s total effect feels a bit more researched than imagined, and Mead’s free-verse prosody, while far more sophisticated than apprentice work, doesn’t always show the confidence of settled expertise.

Read in hindsight, the fourteen new poems concluding To the Wren assemble a miscellany of valedictions.  An image recycled from The Usable Field — “your body as slaughterhouse” —  triggers a frisson of sadness in its new context.  A line from “The World Per Se”—one of her two final poetic sequences — registers as the most stoic of last words: “and that was that.” Another section from the same poem, otherwise legible as a glimpse of transcendence, intimates mortality when read with the knowledge of what’s to come:

 

Where does the world go

when the hungry goldfinches flitting

on the frozen twiggy limbs of the lilac

like electrified buds—

 

“take your breath away,”

and you fly out of your life.

 

Where does the world go

and what’s that other world

that will not keep up?

 

Never mentioning Mead’s cancer explicitly, these gaunt late poems strike me as not so much weary or resigned, as ready.

Most likely, her five discrete collections will stake Mead’s claim to lasting attention.  With so many pleasures and pains in them, what I find missing intrigues me (these are curiosities, not critiques).  I didn’t see, or didn’t recognize, any love poems (except to animals).  She imagines childhood powerfully, but rarely writes about, or to, children.  And despite lots of humor, there’s none of the urbanity many urban poets cultivate to pay tribute to the outrageous.  (“One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes” is pretty much Frank O’Hara’s Complete Nature Poetry.)  An invidious comparison, perhaps: rural life means everything to Mead’s poetry, which sounds nothing like O’Hara’s, although I’ll bet she adored him.  And yet, both have left us hefty legacies of poetic art.  For me, a more visceral bequest also links them — the slight but palpable flinch of awareness that, whenever I take down their books to take pleasure in their work, I can’t look forward to more.

 

[Published by Alice James Books on August 20, 2019, 650 pages, $29.95 softcover]

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