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In
Print: Two poets capture the Vineyard's many parts
August 25, 2005
By Brooks Robards
Two well-known and very different Vineyard poets, Daniel Waters of West Tisbury and Judith B. Herman of Chilmark, won the chapbook contest sponsored by Westmeadow Press of Chilmark this spring. Their winning books, Mr. Waters' “Needing Winter,” and Ms. Herman's “Fishing Rites,” were published early this summer by Westmeadow Press, which is owned by author and editor Julie Kimball of Chilmark.
Mr. Waters, co-proprietor of Indian Hill Press in West Tisbury, is best known for his short, limerick-like verses published in “Yankee” magazine and the Vineyard Gazette and aired on local radio station WCAI-NAN. Also the creator of woodblock prints and cards, Waters often incorporates poetry into his folk-art visual designs.
“Needing Winter,” his second book — he has also published “Quirks of Nature” through Indian Hill Press — gives him the opportunity to explore darker aspects of the Island world he loves. He has organized his 24 poems around the off-season, starting with autumn and ending with spring. More than half of them are sonnets. As he does in his shorter work, Waters works often, if not exclusively, in iambic pentameter, ending with rhymed couplets when he is using the Shakespearean sonnet form, but also employing other rhyme schemes and in some cases word repetitions.
The centerpiece of his collection, “The Hag of Tiah's Cove,” tells the story of a 19th-century spinster named Nancy Luce, whose portrait by Waters appears on the cover of “Needing Winter.” Nancy Luce was a semi-literate eccentric who raised chickens in the basement of her West Tisbury house, gave them names, and wrote poems about them, which she collected in booklets and sold to tourists.
Using a triple sonnet form, Mr. Waters assumes the persona of the adolescent wags who used to taunt Nancy Luce, who despite her peculiar ways inspired respect and understanding among Islanders. “No telling where you found the strength to fight/The rushing blackness of this Island night,” Mr. Waters writes, balancing the courage of this Island original with the Halloween-season fear she must have instilled.
Mr. Waters' poems wax most powerful when he writes about characters like Luce, or Ruth Pepper, an Island stalwart who echoes Wallace Stevens’s “High-Toned Old Christian Woman” and who may have committed suicide in her Buick. He demonstrates a knowledge that goes well beyond the superficialities of the Vineyard’s summer culture.
Most often, Mr. Waters prefers to speak through details of the natural Island world and the changes it experiences. He describes, “How green was just a summer job to trees” in “After the Fall,” or in “Poem in Mid-Winter” complains that, “Mother Nature must have slipped/To make a day so nondescript.”
Some of the best fun in his poems comes when he plays with sound and words, as in “The Price of Up,” where “The snow is old, the cold is very old,” or the hilarious “Her napkin-in-a-bistro-wineglass poise,” from “Skunk Cabbage.”
Most classically beautiful are the meditative quatrains of “Sufficiency,” ending, “Here solitude parts company with dread/And learns to walk, with nothing left to shed.” My favorite comes in “Indian Hill Road,” where the poet lets down his guard for a deeply and satisfyingly romantic celebration of Island beauty.
Clear-eyed precision
Judith B. Herman arranges her disciplined free verse into three sections. In the first, she works like a still-life painter, zeroing in with clear-eyed precision on the “thing-ness of things” to find revelations many might miss.
In the case of “Global Marketing” cleverness reigns as the poet skewers the crassness of modern, multi-language packaging of chocolate. “Black Gloves” suggests with Proustian power how a lost article can call up memories, while the more challenging “The Tuning” takes the occasion of a piano tuning to explore not only the instrument itself, but also its appreciation by tuner and owner and its resonances of the past.
Ms. Herman demonstrates a sure command of the line: “I enter words. It’s what was given me” in “Angelica archangelica”; and a confident capacity to plunge directly into a poem’s subject without unnecessary preliminaries: “Out in back, behind the store,/where the trucks unload and the help park,” in “The Planter.”
The second grouping in “Fishing Rites” consists of three poems that demonstrate a cosmopolitan level to Ms. Herman’s sophistication. With a Ph.D. in English and American Literature, she has taught in both the United States and France. Yet she wears the mantle of her scholarship lightly and with grace in the delightful, “The Prior of S. Maria delle Grazie, to Most Noble Ludivicio, Duke of Milan,” where da Vinci is urged to hurry up and finish “The Last Supper” “to show us the Lord’s face.”
Ms. Herman grounds herself most firmly on the Island, where she has spent “the best part of the year” for the past 30 years, in the third and final section of her collection. “Billy’s Last Dance” confidently balances the poignancy of death with its banality: “It took them ‘til September/to hose out all of Billy from the boat.” Her almost jaunty portraits of Island characters in “Yankee Decoy-Carver at Seventy,” “To Our Caretaker Who Hints of Wanting to Fish in Other Waters,” and “No Checks From Samuel Hopper!” deftly capture some of the rhythms and dynamics of Island relationships.
In “Complaint,” Ms. Herman invests a mundane fishing shack with surprising and original gravity, recalling, “how/When I looked out across the pond, it held/The sea and sky in place.” Subtle as a landscape by a master of watercolor, “Lightfall, Chilmark Pond,” captures the reverent beauty of first light on the Island’s remarkable mix of dunes and water.
Westmeadow Press published “Vineyard Poets: An Anthology of Martha’s Vineyard Writers” in 2003, and plans are in the works for another chapbook, “Quintet,” featuring five more Island poets.
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