Springing

February 25, 2002
"If leaf-trash chokes the stream bed,/ reach for rock-bottom as you rake/ the muck out," writes Ponsot in one of the 26 new poems of this collection, and the lines might well serve as its wry motto. Springing
takes readers on a tour of a quirky, start-stop career, presenting, along with the new work, nine poems from True Minds
(1956), 22 from Admit Impediment
(1981), 26 from The Green Dark
(1988), 19 from The Bird Catcher
(which won the 1998 NBCC Award) and 26 other previously uncollected poems from 1948 to 1971. The 25-year pause in book publication would seem to reflect a period of domestic life, documented in the uncollected work ("watching you strike worldly poses flirting/ excited with someone's arch French wife") and ending in "For a Divorce," which opens the Admit Impediment
section: "Asked why/ we ever married, I smile/ and mention the arbitrary fierce/ glance of the working artist/ that blazed sometimes in your face// but can't picture it." Ponsot's poems are built around just such unflinching observations of intimate interactions and misfires, whether of familial relations ventriloquized through updated Greek dramatis personae, a French woman's accommodation of her mother's married lover or the self's castings about the natural world, "space recast as/ flatness, long/ diminishings of blue/ borne lightly." If the new and uncollected work doesn't have the focus of the trio of books beginning in the '80s, this selection evinces the larger-scale, muckraking pursuit of artifice's underside that Ponsot's speaker so wonderfully produces poem by poem, "smaller and more human than belief." As she writes in "Gliding": "I envision the next leap, the next/ thousand years of practice,/ the eventual skill/ become like independent flight, habitual." Readers will look forward to those practice sessions.