Dawn Potter’s newest collection of poems, How the Crimes Happened, is filled with brilliant contrasts. Elegant form and literary influence clash and reform up against (post)modern American English. The pope, adorned in Christmas regalia, “looks terrible. / . . . and sags to one side like a cat.” His image flickers from the television at a Ramada Inn.
Potter never lets us stray too far from home for long. In Rome’s “Protestant Cemetery,” Potter’s narrator notes her “friend crossing herself, tendering / a muttered prayer for her cancer-mangled breast.” It is a sidelong glance, though, as there is too much else to see: the tumbled headstones of long dead Romantics Keats and Shelley, the “fidgeting” English women in hats, the lusty gravedigger, the evidence of violets near bones.
In the subsequent poem, “There’s no denying him,” we’re back “at Bud’s Shop ‘n Save,” where an “old lady” eyes a mother and young son “like post-office criminals.” The mother in turn studies her child, an elusive reflection of his own father, the two of them “remote as trout in green shallows.” Potter ends with an Icarus-like image, her son a fish in her talons, flying over “the unfolding sea- / white chop, clean spray. / You know the story.”
Even if we don’t, or if we misread the literary allusions, Potter serves up a balance of readily discernible imagery to help digest the more delicate layers of history. One doesn’t have to remember the intricacies of David Copperfield to appreciate the awkward teen riding home on the school bus full of yearning. She pines, “not one bad boy / in the whole world wants me,” Dickens open in her lap. She aches to be “holding hands with a boy in a Kiss t-shirt, my own wild Steerforth.” Had that “Little Em’ly” actually been Potter and consummated such fleeting desires, it is likely we wouldn’t be reading her musings on Eve’s troublesome dreams.
Milton’s Satan has impressed Potter to the point where she can’t resist an entire section devoted to his fall. It is an elegant interlude, the agent of change slithering into the prelapsarian dawn like middle age.
It is easy to imagine how, after being kicked out of the garden, Potter landed in rural Maine. There, in “Cornville,” among “row upon row of dun-colored stubble / fading to dirt,” she can commingle Joe Castiglione, the faltering hopes of young Red Sox fans, the ambiguity of fairy tales, the tragedy of Oedipus, and contemplate how “nothing consoles our lost honor.”
There, as in many of Maine’s small town gymnasiums, Potter can consider parents’ “loyal affection,” snide middle school girls “sucking up Mountain Dew and trying on each other’s shoes,” an audience riveted to “the Harmony School / B-team basketball squad, running heel to heel, full tilt” into slaughter. It’s Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade, and the crowd’s chatter / shivers into silence.”
But Tennyson never played the Stones’ ” ‘Sister Morphine’ four or five times an hour,” while meditating on the conundrum of marital love and vacuuming, watching “Gardens succumb to forest.” He probably never had a Rumpelstiltskin fit against “Rain, and more rain! And now / this whore sunshine!” It is hard to imagine him raging against slugs, and this “Filthy mess of life!” Potter does. And for that, she is one of us.
Keith Eaton is the English teacher at the North Haven Community School.