Sherry Chandler

The other day at Common Grounds Coffee House, David Cazden handed me a book, saying “You might like to read this.” The book was Do Not Peel the Birches (Purdue University Press, 1993) by Fleda Brown [Jackson], Poet Laureate of Delaware.

I opened the book to these lines and was hooked:

Dock

Say dock, dock it’s just a hollow
of itself, the way the foot
echoes between wood and water,
the plank, plank of it
like piano keys, growing hollower
farther out under the stars…

On the back cover of Do Not Peel the Birches, Gerald Stern calls it a collection of “domestic poetry.” I seem to remember reading in some essay somewhere, and I cannot document this, that Joseph Parisi when he was editor of Poetry said that most of their submissions began “I’m standing at my kitchen window and I’m important.” And why not? What is more important than standing at your kitchen window in the morning sun with the stained glass ornament shooting rainbows all around the walls and your hands in the warm ordinary suds? And who more important than “I” to perceive all this? But Brown’s is, as Stern concedes, a domesticity “face to face…with wildness…” Take these lines from “A Long and Happy Life:”

Aunt Cleone is fixing a bowl of raw oatmeal,
yogurt, and sesame seeds.
She takes a damp undershirt from the refrigerator
and unwraps enough purslane and mint leaves
to grind on her cereal. They are arguing
about sex. My father says women don’t like it.
Cleone tells how she and Uncle Bob
made love every day after swimming, how she
wore him out. My mother takes her toast
to the patio and watches a huge jay land
spread-legged on the rail…

An interesting domestic triangle: father, mother, aunt. But it is the whimsy of these poems that really wins me over. Who keeps greens in a damp undershirt? Or consider

The Location of Fleda Phillips Brown

I think my grandmother stays mostly
in this part of the lake, maybe
up to Birch Point,
down to Deepwater Point,
her ashes churning behind big boats,
rocking against the shore…
I swam in her for years, not knowing.

Or:

Elvis at the End of History

It was him, Elvis, sheepishly
stepping out of my outhouse,
looking better than ever, the way
some old men slim down and loosen
their lines. He had left the door open,
the lid slightly ajar on the women’s
hole. As usual, I forgave him…

Dr. Brown is a Professor of English at the University of Delaware. Do Not Peel the Birches is her second book. Her latest is The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives (Carnegie Mellon Press, 2004). Follow this link to read “Elvis Reads ‘The Wild Swans at Coole.’” See a full list of Fleda Brown’s publications here.