What power of vision do we gain with the setting of the sun? As the evening progresses, all is reduced to a silhouette or echo of its daytime presence. “The river loses all but a sound. /The bull keeps only its bulk.” Our eyes search for things we have only just seen before us, but we are suddenly unable to find them. We make out contours of familiar objects but can no longer appreciate their finer textures.

As the limits of our sensory vision continue to narrow, we begin to connect these moonlit silhouettes in more and more fantastic, personal ways. The darkening landscape becomes peopled with inhabitants of our inner lives. Nighttime shadows coalesce into strikingly vivid images — of our forgetfulness, of our unfulfilled, nostalgic dreams, of our helplessness in the face of death. The darkness illuminates populations of memories and fantasies which daylight allows us to see only imperfectly, as specters of their starkly real nighttime selves.

One would conventionally expect such phantoms to spring out at us or draw us into involved conversations like the nightmares in Goya’s sketches. Here, however, the transfigured landscape remains silent and still. “The dead are standing along the other edge /of the river, but do not go to meet them. /Being no powerful than they were before.” The dead are planted into the emergent night landscape like monuments or trees, as domesticated and as stable as its daytime inhabitants. The loss of our daily vision does not give them greater power over ourselves; it only gives us greater clarity in noticing them.

Many generalizations could be made about the poetry of Linda Gregg. Her poetic career spans several decades and has earned her a number of prestigious literary awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a PEN award, as well as words of highest admiration from writers as varied as Joseph Brodsky, W.S. Merwin, and Czeslaw Milosz. Looking through her recently issued All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems, an array of over two hundred poems chosen from all of her six previous books, one immediately zeroes in on several central themes. Struggling with grief and personal loss is the most prominent of them. It is shown in ways ranging from early, violent images of the Shakespearean Lavinia through a restrained Emersonian or Taoist immersion in nature, to impressionistic recollections reminiscent of Sei Shonagon’s Makura no Soshi. Equally apparent is a love of semi-wild landscapes, American deserts and Greek islands. She peoples these landscapes with geographically accurate, well-specified flora and fauna as well as mythical beings from Greek and (occasionally) Judeo-Christian traditions.

To focus on these broad contours of Gregg’s poetry, however, largely misses the thrust of her project. Like in her dreamscape poem described above, the weight of her works is not contained in its obviously recurrent landmarks, or in the limits of the emotional and cultural repertoire within which she decides to work. Her greatest insights are, instead, anchored in the unexpected, vivid reality she gives to moods and specters more ethereal than the predictable, sturdy objects among which they hover, ones we begin to notice only when we examine these solid landscapes in carefully dosed, dim light.

Opening the volume, one is first struck by the poems’ confident familiarity. Many of them are addressed to a figure on the threshold between a close friend and a lover, one with whom one can use all the mental shortcuts of intimate speech. They rapidly motion towards individuals and events the implied reader took part in or has already heard about:

I say, “I stayed in Motel 6, where you told
me
to stay.” He says, “I meant The Chicago Inn.”
That was this winter’s visit. That was a year.

Others encode into mythological or allegorical stories small details and confessions which seem to refer to a well-known and well-rehearsed personal loss, reconciliation, or crisis:

I am the one chosen by the lion at sundown
and dragged back from the shining water.
Yanked back to bushes and torn open, blood
blazing at the throat and breast of me.

One can easily imagine that a more intimate acquaintance of Gregg’s could see in many such poems a sort of personal diary or camera snapshot, one in which he could instantly discern and name all of the voices and faces. For the average reader, coming to Gregg’s text from beyond this circle of intimacy, it takes a while until this very personal, involved tone feels comfortable and transparent. To begin to orient oneself in the broad contours of the history Gregg implicitly expects one to understand, one has to read the book at least twice over, carefully noting all repeated landmarks and voices. 

Presented in this foreshortened form, the rehearsed events of the life of Gregg’s persona become reduced to contours of their fleshed-out, real-life selves. Rather than devolve into autobiographical gossip, Gregg’s poems seem tantalizingly restrained: we are cognizant of a sincere, intimate movement deeper below the surface of their concise syntax but never quite capable of reaching its origins. They are a personal landscape in nighttime, one whose components the observer sees only as a mixture of disembodied, ghostlike visions and sounds.

To trace out all the paths one can take in following these spectral creatures within and among Gregg’s poems would take up a sizeable book. One of the most important early presences is Alma — an alter ego Gregg adopts in her early poems only to drop her entirely after her second volume.

To talk of these two first volumes as early ones is in some ways misleading — while they constitute Gregg’s first extensive published work, the first of them emerges from the printing press when Gregg is over thirty years old. The books are a strange mixture of juvenilia and emotional maturity. They are, stylistically, the first bold steps taken by a poet who has yet to develop, and whose writing could still evolve in many directions. At the same time, the feelings and images they convey coalesce into weighty, conclusive statements from a person whose inner life has already moved far beyond a juvenile sense of innocence or inexperience. 

Throughout these early poems, Alma is a titanic presence in the literal sense of the term, both a model and an exaggeration of the forms of humanity and divinity Gregg will create in her later books. Often mentioned by name (and giving the title to Gregg’s second book), but sometimes referred to only as “she,” or “I,” Alma voices a personal drama whose outlines will continue to loom over Gregg’s poetry for many years. Alma’s marriage, fallen apart a few years back, is returning to her in fits and starts. She dwells on the husband’s humiliatingly blatant unfaithfulness only to be momentarily soothed by the memory of an instant’s mutual comprehension:

It has been a long time now
since I stood in our dark room looking
across the court at my husband in her
apartment.
Watched them make love.
She was perhaps more beautiful
from where I stood than to him.
I can say it now: she was like a vase
lit the way milky glass is lighted.

The setup of the stanza seems both vividly real and fantastic; it hovers on the brink between the episodic and the allegorical. It is hard to imagine the persona’s voyeurism as anything else than a metaphoric summary of a long marriage crisis; however, the feelings she describes as the effect of her gazing seem immediate and spontaneous, a surprise to Alma herself. The poem is startlingly frank in declaring the husband’s betrayal. Yet it refuses to speak of the pain which this betrayal causes, or even acknowledge the rupture that we intuit has taken place. The persona continues to think of him and her as a shared “we.” She is watching the lovers out of “our dark room,” a room which she and her husband still share. She also allows herself to contemplate her rival’s body with a desire mirroring her husband’s. Indeed, from within the confines of the space they should be sharing, she finds herself getting a better view than his of what attracts him to this other woman. Instead of demonizing her rival and her husband, the persona fixates our gazes on the outward beauty of the scene they form, assuming a closeness to the figures she witnesses that does not allow her or her reader to turn away their eyes. Her suffering is made to seem fantastically intense because it is not pronounced, emerging within the statuesque, seemingly stable presences of the poem as an unexpected, demonic aura.

In these early poems, moments of such intense, emphatically unpronounced suffering are frequent. In one of the collection’s most violent poems, Alma appears as Lavinia with her arms and tongue ripped out, a mute effigy of personal grief. Others show her recalling moments when she helplessly waited for her husband on a dark bridge or ran away from him and heard him call after her in empty streets.

In later volumes, the involvement of these poems gradually gives way to a more resigned, quieter melancholy, with no more than occasional flashes of their initial turmoil. The persona sheds her alter ego and begins to reshape her life among returning memories of her husband, other lovers she takes and is rejected by, new places which she begins to inhabit and tries to make her own. The poems grow more opaque. They interweave the very episodic and the very abstract in ways that make them increasingly haunting, but also make this haunting impression increasingly difficult to place:

An owl lands on the side
of the road. Turns its head
to look at me going fast,
window open to the night
on the desert. Clean air,
and the great stars.
I’m trying to decide
if this is what I want.

Commencing with very sparse, detached description, the poem suddenly reveals itself to be a moment of self-questioning. Gregg forces our gaze outwards, towards a sharply sketched, momentary landscape and unexpectedly plants us within this landscape as within a mental space we are to explore; a space of direct sensory observation becomes one of fantasy and speculation. The last two lines seem meaningful, in some ways connected to the description they unexpectedly cap, but do not give us quite enough to be able to name exactly the emotional state Gregg is gesturing towards. This mixture of extreme intimacy and extreme detachment persists throughout the volume. The poems’ restrained dignity and sincerity gives us an acute sensation of interacting with, and learning from, a mature, quietly self-confident mind. 

“There is a hunger for order, and a thirst against,” says Linda Gregg in one of her most memorable later poems. Many poets have hurled themselves into similar conclusions amidst thunder and lightning; Gregg ushers us into hers carefully, with measured calm, as into a shelter she has built. For her, the need for the familiar and the need for the chaotic are not two tormenting divinities we have to choose between; they are sister caryatids of the same spiritual edifice. Fervent and visionary in her self-scrutinies like a modern-day Saint Anthony, Gregg has a generosity and mercifulness most writers of her depth and intensity of insight tend to lack. Her poetic voice pursues an image of the world at once objective and intimate, well-defined but with room for conjecture, overwhelming but, in the end, more edifying than destructive.

All that Marta Figlerowicz ’09 knows of Linda Gregg, she learned from Liza Flum ’10. Hi, Liza Flum ’10!