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Blessings and Inclemencies: Poems

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BLESSINGS AND INCLEMENCIES, Constance Merritt's second published collection of poetry, is best read aloud so the cadences and the rhythms may swirl from the tongue through the ears to reverberate in the mind. Let the echoes and caprices of memories, nature, and classical gods linger.

"Isn't it the naming that we love" the poet wonders, and surely the verses in
Prologue: Song: At the Edge of the Sea,
I. Requiem,
II. Among Shades: A Fragment,
III. Turning: A Sequence, and
Epilogue: Chamber Music
give both beatific and remorseful tribute to this very human current of desire.

"Charon plies his oars. Sweat glistens / On his grizzled brow..." as Merritt steers out into deep waters of loss. "Don't go and leave me stranded on this shore," she entreats. She rages against the inevitability of the deaths of loved ones and pounds the notion that the guiding hand of an Almighty can make all things well: "Let others justify / the ways of God to men; she never would / She'd already stood the s.o.b. on trial."

Yet the mourning poet is yet here, not turning to loam, so "At three o'clock, I wake to rain" and "...know it is I who will labor to be born." Then "...the lengthening light, the robin's song / That wakes me... / (For the first time in my life I want to see!)." Merritt is, after all, a sightless poet, and, as the blind do, she expands the reach and delicacy of her other senses. By way of illustration, she mingles her own poetry of heightened sensitivity with the verse of Hilda Raz: "My every organ sings you like a psalm: Sun, sun come to me here, come here I am."

In BLESSINGS AND INCLEMENCIES, beauty and poignancy consort with uncomforted mourning. Love answers every call on its own terms; but friends, family, and lovers whom death parts, but cannot be returned so..."Me, I'd like to think the rhythm moved / Us, until the dance, itself, was what we loved."