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May 08, 2006
Sight and sound
In June’s high light she stood at the sink
With a glass of wine,
And listened for the bobolink,
And crushed garlic in late sunshine.
I watched her cooking, from my chair.
She pressed her lips
Together, reaching for kitchenware,
And tasted sauce from her fingertips.
“It’s ready now. Come on,” she said.
“You light the candle.”
We ate, and talked, and went to bed,
And slept. It was a miracle.
This is “Summer Kitchen” from Donald Hall’s new book of selected poems, White Apples and the Taste of Stone.
On Friday, I drove Hall down to Cambridge. This was our annual pilgrimage to a session with the Nieman Fellows at Harvard. I am the chauffeur and introducer, and Don reads poems and talks with the Fellows about poetry. “Summer Kitchen” was one of the poems he read.
During the discussion, Bob Giles, curator of the Nieman program, mentioned how much like a painting the poem seemed. To him, it was a scene told through the poet’s eyes, much as an artist might observe and paint it. I thought this was a keen observation. The poem made me think of certain Dutch and Flemish artists of centuries past. I could see Vermeer looking into that kitchen in the light of late afternoon and painting a woman licking sauce from her fingers. Like Hall’s poem, Vermeer’s paintings often portray women who seem not to know they are being watched. The artist is not so much a voyeur as an observer stopping time to preserve a domestic act that a lesser eye might not even see.
Hall’s answer to Giles surprised me. No, Hall said without a pause, he remembered how this poem had begun and what had driven it, and it had nothing to do with the scene in the poem or even with the sense of sight. For Hall, it was all about sound. Without referring to the text, he rattled off “high, light, wine, sunshine.” He spoke of how he worked “candle” and “miracle” into the rhyme scheme. He mentioned that fellow poet Hayden Carruth had suggested that he add the word “her” to the last line of the second stanza, even though it introduced an extra beat. Originally the line had read: “And tasted sauce from fingertips.”
I have heard Hall talk about sound many times. He once scoffed at a well-known biographer who had written a life of Keats without discussing the sound of his poetry. Thomas Hardy is one of Hall’s favorite poets, and he often quotes from a Hardy poem to demonstrate the way a poet uses sound.
What I liked about the discussion of “Summer Kitchen” was the way Bob Giles’s perception of it and Hall’s perception of it both seemed right to me. That is one of the joys of poetry. You can go back to a lovely little lyric like this again and again and see it in different lights. As good as it is to know that Hall was obsessed with sound while creating it, the reader needn't stop there.
Postscript
If you’ve ever wondered how our local good gray poet plays outside of New Hampshire, a couple of clues showed up in print recently. The poet Billy Collins gave Hall's White Apples and the Taste of Stone a warm and thoughtful review in the Washington Post last month. And in The New Republic, Rochelle Gurstein’s joint review of memoirs about their late spouses by Hall and Joan Didion reminded readers that the real recent masterpiece on mourning was Hall’s book of poems on Jane Kenyon’s death, Without.
Posted by Mike Pride at May 8, 2006 09:37 AM