The Highwayman’s Wife

Lynnell Edwards’s second book, The Highwayman’s Wife (Red Hen Press, 2007), is a collection organized on frames within frames.

Overarching all, like the roof to the house, is a sort of Shepherd’s Calendar for modern times. In 1579, Edmund Spenser published the most famous English Shepherd’s Calendar, a series of pastoral poems spoken by a “simple” shepherd, one for each month of the year. It was an imitation of the Italian poet Baptista Mantuanus’s Adulescentia, which were in turn an imitation of the Latin poet Virgil’s Eclogues, which were in turn an imitation of the Greek poet Theocritus’s Bucolics. It’s a tradition Maurice Manning is also buying into with his own Bucolics, a book I’ve discussed here.

Edwards’s poems refer to a considerably later Shepherd’s Calendar, that of John Clare (also here). Written in 1827, Clare’s work was a protest against the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions that were transforming the English countryside. His poetry tended toward the elegiac. He is often referred to as England’s most important poets of the natural world.

Although Clare was known as the “Northamptonshire Peasant Poet” and Edwards has written a book entitled The Farmer’s Daughter (Red Hen, 2003), resemblances between the pair are few. In Edwards’s world, the changes Clare was opposing are a done deal. Her calendar, each beginning with an epigraph from Clare is mostly suburban, with little of the archaic or bucolic.

Except for the prelude poem, The Highwayman’s Wife occurs within the calendar. The first poem in the collection is January, entitled “Cold As”

It is cold this morning, cold as
ice cream with the Eskimos, cold
as a witches, cold as the comfort
of the brute alarm that pulled you
into this darkness. …

The last poem is December, entitled “Snow Day”

Lovely the snow as it floats from the sky, and lovely
the bare trees pillowed in white; lovely the martin
tracking across the playground walk. And lovely
the shout of Snow! that startles the class from
its drill and practice…

And all the other months are shuffled throughout the collection like cards.

Within the overarching frame of the calendar are several other collections, the most prominent being the sonnet-like sequence that makes up the second numbered section of the book: “enter the highwayman.” There are eleven of these loose sonnets, twelve if you count the prelude poem “Sonnet for the Highwayman.”

Edwards has a considerable edge and “Sonnet for the Highwayman” lets us know just what kind of a manifesto we’re going to find in this collection. It’s a poem that promise to ravish the ravisher:

I will rob you, lover. Cut your purse,
pilfer the gold coins stitched inside your shirt
when I reach for a kiss, ungirdle your bright sword
for my own device, whirl away into the Highland night.
And you thinking this is the safe house . . .

The highwayman’s life is not all that free and easy as envisioned by these poems. From “Weapons, the Road”

Pistols, derringers, daggers, ropes, no matter
what you pack you’re not prepared. Disaster
happens quick from lack of feed as power,
your beast no more reliable than the weather:

It is certainly not honorable and romantic. From “How It’s Done”

When drunkards stagger from the lighted inn,
or husbands travel to town, helpless, burdened
with a foundered hog, a ragged goat,
ambush is the surest. . . .

Another shorter series is the five poem “Suite for Wives,” one each for Medusa, Helen, Juno, Penelope, and Cassandra. As with the Shepherd’s Calendar, these classic suffering women are viewed through a modern lens. The poems are an outlet for Edwards’s gift for satire. Here’s the beginning of the poem about Cassandra, called “Trophy” because Cassandra was quite literally a trophy wife, and who, of course, knows where all this is leading:

Agamemnon, baby, hot
from acquisition, trade,
splendid astride your plunder,
speed me across
the wine-dark lake
in your terrible vessel.
Gilt me as you will:
I am your morning-glory, daylily,
bikini-clad figurehead
wedged in the thrust
of a cigarette-sleek bow.

Agamemnon has met his match.

So to speak.

As Cassandra has met her doom — and knows it.

One more series interleaved through the collection — the Last Call poems play with the notion of mixed drinks. “Last Call: Mint Julep” is typical:

Make it despite impossible odds,
trifecta of sugar, sweet mint,
bourbon tipped over ice. . .

There are, of course, poems in this 99-page collection that do not fit into a series, many of which reflect Edwards’s concern with the odd mix of rural and suburban that is life in present-day Kentucky, and perhaps much of the South as it becomes industrialized. Edwards presents these changes with a mixture of humor and anger, as I think my clips illustrate. Her language is fast and sure, as tough, as the babe on the cover photograph.

I enjoyed every word of it, sometimes raising my power fist and crying “Right on!”

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Update: You can read Lynnell’s Pushcart Nominated poem “Suite for Red River Gorge” at this link.

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