This Sharpening
by Ellen Doré Watson

New England Watsershed
Winter 2006-2007

"Our Wild and Precious Lives"
Review by Jeanne Braham

The striking cover of Ellen Doré Watson's fourth poetry collection depicts ice-covered tree branches caught somewhere between the melting and refreezing process, their shiny droplets pointed and dangerous as thorns. In several ways it is an apt metaphor for the content of this arresting volume, which chronicles the dissolution of a long marriage, its meltings, refreezings and attendant sharpenings of the mind and heart.

Currently director of the Poetry Center at Smith College and an editor of The Massachusetts Review, Watson came to her own poetic vocation after translating 11 books from Brazilian Portuguese. She won particular acclaim for her translations and interviews with the Catholic Brazilian poet Adelia Prado, and her poetry bears affinities to Prado's melding of the earthy and the spiritual.

Like all superb translators, Watson understands that fidelity to the emotion is infinitely more important than locating the literal word; her poems offer - in their explosive rhythms, surprising turns of syntax, and emotional energy - the off-balance, speeding roller-coaster ride that is the experience of dissolving a 25-year-old union, of finding oneself, in the bargain, a single parent of a complicated and gifted daughter, of simultaneously parenting one's aging parents, of coming to grips with the likelihood of living alone.

      NOT A SWEATER
      An unmarriage is not a sweater half
      unraveled or sheared in two not half
      of anything not a husk or shed thing
      or artifact behind glass or in the rubbish
      not at the bottom of the sea calling out
      not tied to a chair with duct tape sealing
      its mouth an unmarriage is not what one
      or the other or anyone thinks not storm cloud
      or tremor or even the sky finally in placid
      agreement with the earth though like weather
      it is not the air we breathe nor the mechanism
      of breathing but irrefutably present in the gray
      pink yellow bubblewrap of lung tissue in
      perpetuity in the air pocketed down deep
      not sustaining not part of the fabric
      not dead

Lyrical, sometimes confessional, sometimes confrontational, her poems go where you don't expect them to go, where you yourself would never dream of going. Blazing honesty in the poet can invite blazing honesty in a reader, especially when that honesty is leavened with insight and humor:

      FIRST DATE IN TWENTY-FIVE YEARS
      Buttoning my sweater over the huge splotch
      of white wine splashed to neutralize the coin
      of red dribbled earlier in my nerves, I sit down
      across from the man and I've forgotten how
      to use a fork. At home, I set the story we might make
      beside the story I am making. To the first I give lots
      of room and no punctuation; from the second I subtract
      destruct, add self. Doze off feeling kissed. Morning
      proper finds me weeping into the bathwater; I must
      turn into the one I've been threatening to become,
      faster.

In less skilled hands, the saga of a failed marriage and its aftermath could slide toward the Slough of Despond. But fortifying Watson's crackling diction and humor is a kind of architectural trompe l'oeil she employs to great effect. The poems are written in free verse, yet are frequently arranged in even parallel lines containing approximately the same number of beats. The deceptively conventional exterior constrains a pent-up reservoir of feelings on the cusp of release. It's rather like pouring molten lava into a lunchbox. Self-pity doesn't live here.

In a poem titled "Doing Is Believing," Watson lists - in 16 verb-driven lines - a kind of personal credo (which is, at the same time, a wonderful parody of Benjamin Franklin's maxims for self-improvement). Her lines dance and dive, chat with each other, and refuse all temptations to moralize:

      March into everything look for the hinge
      Hit the beach of midlife as if at dawn
      Entertain certain whims before weeping
      Heed heartbeat entering untested hallways
      Test becoming in unbecoming light
      Seek beacon at dusk when stained beholden
      Disdain stains produced by past impatience
      Dream of meeting on the cusp of mid-blunder
      Don't hurry the girl bedding mid-promise
      Don't bed your anger or launder your words
      Wash your money in the day's true minute
       Bow to child's-play worship silly and snow
      Hail red clouds despite harm in the offing
      Spite the past's dime-a-dozen things undone
      Deny each tempting free pass to worry
      Leap after tripping believing it song

There's something contagious about Watson's daring. In rendering pans of her life story with such fierce veracity, the poet entices a reader to join her - in acknowledging the congregation of losses that accompany aging, in risking seeming safety in order to live deeply and love wholly. The question Mary Oliver asks in one of her best-loved poems reverbrates (just off-stage) again and again in Ellen Watson's poems:

"TELL ME, WHAT IS IT YOU PLAN TO DO WITH YOUR ONE WILD AND PRECIOUS LIFE?"

This is a book full of courageous replies.