I first read Lucie Brock-Broido in Poetry magazine a few years back. It was the issue that published the poem “Extreme Wisteria” (first link below) from this collection, Stay, Illusion. From the first time I read that poem, I was in my mother-in-law’s house. At that time, she lived behind a purple door, the only one on the street with such a unique vibrancy. It was a two-story house out of a storybook, hardwood, with a winding and treacherous, yet cozy, staircase that led to the second bedroom where my wife lived when we first started dating again. She had two cats: Eliza and Holly. Holly would later become mine and my wife’s cat, though I had a better rapport with Eliza.
Now, she lives in a loft, strangely absent of cats (no way to let one outside) but the interior is much the same as it was when she abandoned suburban Decatur for Cabbage Town in Atlanta proper. She favors purples and reds, but with splashes of brown that compliments wood, so it’s more maroons and burgundies. She has black and white pictures of family and strangers and historical figures and settings that I’ve never asked her about and she’s offered no explanation. No need, they are all somehow seamlessly integrated into the aesthetic whole. She has picture frames that frame nothing but an empty space of wall. A grand piano and a miniature statue of Michaelangelo’s David. It’s artistic, but less like a museum and more like a curio shop. It’s comfortable and genteel and southern, but with the old world antique stylishness of late-nineteenth century or early-twentieth Paris. Ecclectic, if I must summarize, though the word does not do the artfulness of her decor justice. Her house is equally suited for cocktail conversation; rainy red wine and Russian novel afternoons; or to wake up in with the children on Christmas morning. The decor is thoughtfully and intelligently constructed, controlled and comfortable in its solitude. Should she ever come across them, I would like to think my mother-in-law would like the poems in this book, as they are very similar in their composition, though with poetry that’s always too personal to say for certain. Sometimes, poems can be too close to a person, sometimes associations can be misinformed. At any rate, I believe the volume would fit nicely in her house.
Ms. Brock-Broido, who passed a year or so back, left only four slim volumes that I’m aware of, but I know that two of them approach absolute perfection: 1995’s The Master Letters, and this one, from 2013. In both books (though Stay, Illusion is my favorite), I am blown away by the simultaneous wildness and control that charge her lines with the subtle yet forceful grace of a dancer. Often outlandish, in terms of subject matter and imagery, precision and technique give her verse a uniquely uninhibited yet formal quality. Dickinson is low-hanging fruit, but a true comparison, nonetheless (see the inspiration forThe Master Letters), in that few poets can match her mental power and still retain such a degree of charm. Whitman is perhaps less low-hanging, but almost the same amount of influence, though likely by way of Wallace Stevens, if I had to guess. She uses long, controlled lines though ecstatic in their prosody so they may not be mistaken for prose. Dickinson, Whitman, Stevens. She bares no comparison with any lesser poets in my mind. The meaningless in these poems takes on meaning and meaningfulness unravels. An aging seamstress, reclusive, widowed 40 years ago after being married not six months, the narrative voice of these poems knows it knots with the same thread as the Three Sisters, the Furies, the fabric of fate. I know little about the biography of the poet herself, she was director of Columbia University creative writing program. She died at just 61 years old. Her work lives still and reveals the nature of form itself, so that you want to beg of her books to let the
“Illusion/ Stay – a cut sewn up by the quartet of sad-stringed/ instruments made of cat gut ligatures still used/ In certain open-hearted surgeries.”
The eclecticism of image, the ordered rhythm of the sounds, the primordial grasp of meaning itself, these are the lines of someone who should still be read in whatever our new equivalent of 500 years is. Maybe 5,000. How long ago is Li Po? Just short of the Tao Te Ching, I think, but long in the tooth, nonetheless. You get my meaning.
Or perhaps you don’t. In that case, let me link you here to her best recommendation: The poems themselves.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/55939/extreme-wisteria
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/56168/currying-the-fallow-colored-horse
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/55938/father-in-drawer