Speck and Flame in the Lunar Poetry of Marnie Pomeroy

Imanol Gómez Martín

A poet and critic (with books on Sylvia Plath, Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson) as well as a painter, Marnie Pomeroy was born in the countryside near Millbrook, New York, in 1932, and has lived for more than 50 years in Canada.

It may be paradoxical to begin an article on her poetry with a poem she initially titled ‘Epitaph’ (later ‘My Story’), but here it is:

Born to bear witness, first in paint, then rhyme.
Lived thrall to fears and pleasures. Took my time
In kindling love-struck work, so failed my prime.
I sum life’s motley up:  Rich—Cruel—Sublime.

This four-line poem seems to embody the Socratic maxim that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’; in it, Pomeroy briefly describes how she lived, her successes and failures, culminating in the summation of the last line. Note that the order of the three adjectives ‘rich’, ‘cruel’, ‘sublime’, does not merely reflect the requirements of rhyme, but rather the order of the words’ importance, with prominence given to ‘sublime’. This subtle way of presenting herself to the reader is an indicator of Marnie Pomeroy’s psychological and poetic intelligence.

In a review of the 2016 collection, Blue Moon, Pomeroy’s former husband, the poet Seán Haldane, had this to say about her poetic technique: ‘At a technical level, Marnie makes few mistakes. Vowels and consonants are varied, with no distracting assonances or alliterations, and no s’s eliding with other s’s. And as usual in her work, when rhymes occur it is not too often for what she is saying.’ And Robert Graves, with whom (as we shall see) Pomeroy was for a while closely associated, had this to say of Pomeroy: ‘She worries at her poems like a dog at a bone, and though finding it hard to curb a naturally florid imagination, always persists until she has beaten her problem.’

Pomeroy’s three most essential collections are The Speck (1972), which includes poems from the previous volumes For Us Living (1970), Soft Jobs and Miracles (1969), and A Calendar for Dinah (1966), all published by Ladysmith Press, Quebec; and The Flaming (2010) and Blue Moon (2015), both published by Greenwich Exchange Publishing, London. These books seem to take us back to a pre-Socratic cosmology. Pomeroy defines herself in cosmological terms in the first three lines of The Speck’s title poem:

Here’s spot-lit theatre with The Void for background:
The speck God blew on stirred, got up, and danced.
That’s me, till dropping from fatigue and pain.   

Amorous passion and raw desire feature throughout The Speck, revealed with a feminine vision both transparently, as in ‘I the Pool, You the River’, and erotically, as in ‘Nakedness’. There is a vein of protest, too, in response to such issues as climate change (see the poem ‘Permafrost’) and excessive consumerism (see ‘At the Town Dump’). Domesticity (‘Eggs, a geranium and the nicest girl’) is portrayed vividly and sensitively in poems that dilate on family, friends and death. This recurring theme of family can be seen in her marvellous poems for her daughters. ‘For Maeve, Aged Three’ begins:

Welcome to the world!
Yet as I introduce it to you
I become your guest.

and ends…

As I walk with you
I am steadied by your hand –
a conductor through your small pure person
to bed-rock below.
Now everything must hold sure,
with you to see it so.

Monotony and the writing life recur as themes in The Speck, but there are also astrological charts, the sun and the moon (described anthropologically), and the White Goddess as Muse. Audacity, bravery and a not very contained modesty are in evidence in poems such as ‘A Paean’, which begins:

My innocent white ass,
you have pissed and shat with me
from my zero year
to this gross, menstrual maturity.

Pomeroy returns to the theme of writing in The Flaming, and the fear of the blank page, the poem unwilling at first to reveal itself…

Midnight. Still no poem comes.
With the window black and the lamp on
and my knees cocked, I lie flat writing this,
wishing anything would change for the better

but reveal itself it does:

My handwriting went to seed
shortly after he left me.
It leaned and flopped and straggled
out of the bombsite of my psyche.

Then there are those poems that are so perfect they cannot be captured on paper…

Your greatest lines are penned across the sky
with up-and-down wing-strokes of geese flown by
(from ‘Poems Not Written Down’)

Death is there from the beginning as a theme in Pomeroy’s poetry, whether recording her grief over her dead dog or anticipating her own end, but her vision of death changes through the course of her work. One early poem, ‘Among Still Lives’, features a glass doll with no voice, while the subject of a later poem, ‘Grandmother’, has a voice that’s capable of describing her sad destiny. The Flaming culminates in a series of poems that proceed like an orderly farewell.

The moon is never far away, either. The fourth section of The Flaming is bright with a lunar splendour often connected to the Goddess:

The moon’s bright milk is spilled
for night in its black felinity.

continuing…

The full moon’s flashlight
searches out her prey
in night’s labyrinthine cellar.

and while the moon also tires…

But the old moon with her powdery face
enchants no one. Shawl in gray

she creeps westward, bent on finding
the night’s door before she dies

it doesn’t lose hope…

and she dreams the road through sun-up, and the blinding
renewal, where her old trick is to rise

This lunar preoccupation is reflected in the title of Pomeroy’s most recent collection, Blue Moon. In it she describes with meticulous seriousness the seasons, downpours, January mornings, orderly spring, and personality of different trees. And she returns to the problem of time, explaining what the earth without time was or would be: that is, paradise.

Nature as a theme takes on new strength in Blue Moon. Pomeroy portrays landscapes, including the landscapes of her childhood, with passion and also mastery – her knowledge of botany is truly impressive. All is described not just with a poet’s eye but a painter’s (Pomeroy is an accomplished artist). This is how she introduces the third section of Blue Moon, ‘The Spring’:

Today, from a hilltop overlooking the Wassaic valley, we could hear the roar of five streams headed for the Turkey Hollow gorge, each made grand by melting snow and by innumerable tributaries from these Berkshire-mountain foothills.Far below, the ditch beside our road has become a brook; every field is guttered; every rock in the woods turns into a mini-waterfall; and the big, steady Turkey Hollow Falls now translates water into a newly tremendous thunder.

But while floods of March and droughts of August come and go, the overflow from our spring continues ever at its modest pace towards Wassaic.

Nature combines with self-discovery in this poem bearing her own name:

Marnie

Nicknamed for Margaret, ‘Pearl,’ alone,
I lap myself around and around
with inwardness over the grit in the middle.

My heart becomes a moony stone,
by endless licks of pleasure grown
smooth in glow and hue.

Deepening iridescent skin,
I hide, rolled up to softly shine
for me, and far off—maybe—you.

A moonstone, the moon – the theme of the Goddess, the Muse: all of this in a poet who formed a close relationship with Robert Graves (and his wife, Beryl), living for a time with the Graveses in the house that the surviving family still maintains in Deyá, Mallorca. Graves chose three poems by the young Pomeroy for inclusion in the magazine New World Writing’s 14th issue, along with other poets in the ‘Graves circle’ such as Martin Seymour-Smith, James Reeves and Alastair Reid.

Among Graves’s letters compiled by his eldest child (now in his mid-80s), William, are some written for Pomeroy in which Graves shares such anecdotes as his exchange of autographs with Charlie Chaplin ‘who spoke almost tearfully in praise of Latin’. He also advises her, characteristically, not to get involved in politics.

Pomeroy wrote a ‘White Goddess poem’ for Graves which appears for the first time in my Spanish translations of her poems, Partícula y llama, published in November 2024 by El Desvelo. The poem is a gift to every reader, which I reproduce here:

Your Presents (for R. G.)

You gave me gloves of powerful fairy green
To pass me through cross-quarter days, a queen;
And this black stone, an axehead I can seat
In a bowl of water where three branches meet
To draw the Goddess’s flash of influence.
You taught me where she hides; to reverence
The pristine moon, her crane, white pig, and bean;
What star-cored apples, whistling, and hawthorn mean.

I, being woman, with your gloves, and stone,
Can walk the imperiled night reversed from crone
To snow-bright maid. You told me how, this year,
My glance should be dire-blue, a breeze my ear,
My cunning, daughter to the siren fish.
Should men, grown fervid to perform my wish,
Crowd at a flicker of the emerald glove
To thrice endure their violent deaths for love.

If, when jaded by debauch and work,
I trail some ending year to find the dark
Chambers in dreaming half already known;
If east of the sun, west of the triple moon
And back of the north wind, revolving still,
Her silver castle crowns the high glass hill;
If nimbly I can climb there: Thanks again
Most greatly for your friendship’s talisman.

 

Partícula y llama: Antología poética de Marnie Pomeroy by Marnie Pomeroy (Author), Imanol Gómez Martín (Editor, Translator), Javier Fernández Rubio (Editor).
Imanol Gómez Martín’s own poems are collected in the recently published Taller de ausencias: Poesía escogida y obra nueva.