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Mary Stanleyabout Mary Stanley |
Review ofStarveling YearA. W. Stockwell From Landfall 26, June 1953, pp. 139-40 |
The title of Mary Stanley’s first collection scarcely does her poems justice. To a reader coming fresh to her work, it might suggest no more than yet another record (sensitively written no doubt, for otherwise it would not have appeared in the Pegasus Poets series), of spiritual undernourishment and frustration. But such anticipations are happily belied by the poems themselves. Dear second-born whose narrow head was end This is specially true of the love poems, which are among the most immediately attractive in the book. The concluding images of "Night Piece", for example, beautifully convey the mystery and wonder of love’s fruition, where love is firmly rooted in physical passion.
We heard In other moods, in "Waking, the Rising Wind" and "Sestina", she expresses in equally moving lines the ultimate pain of romantic love; she knows, that is, of the individual privacy and separation of lovers, which precludes appeal or escape, and which no passion can penetrate or bridge. But this knowledge, in turn, is countered by devotion and the joy of what union is possible. As a group the love poems are very varied; in theme and treatment each is different from the rest. "Threefold Prayer" counsels forbearance; in "Per Diem et Per Noctem" unselfregarding love is triumphantly evoked. When appropriate she can write with delightful wit. "Put off Constricting Day" begins easily and colloquially, rising through a note of half-humorous self-assertion to an admirable climax. A similar lightness of touch is displayed in "Householder". Some of the poems are addressed to the writer’s children. With the example of other poets in mind, who have attempted to speak fondly of children in verse, one is inclined to approach this group with trepidation, but May Stanley’s sure tact enables her to succeed where Swinburne, for instance, so embarrassingly failed. "Puer Natus", which begins My little son, lie down to sleep, Heir to our sins The experience of suffering and pain is fully explicit in "Record Perpetual Loss", where she grieves at the inadequacy of grief itself; but it sounds an undertone, as well, in almost every poem. To her, everyone in his innermost being is both Caliban and Ariel; consequently it is no surprise to find that the last two poems of this volume, "Cut off by Tides" and "Address to Adam’s Heir", which make her most general statements about human nature, are couched in specifically religious terms. In the first of these, she doubts even love, the assurance of which is so powerful in earlier poems; she finds comfort only in the possibility of atonement. It is hardly to be expected that every poem in a first collection will be uniformly successful. Sometimes the fluidity of Mary Stanley’s utterance is inclined to be impeded by images which are too clogging, and occasionally the nerve in her verse becomes numb – but briefly and rarely. She doesn’t aim at startling effects, but in her best poems she speaks in an individual tone. Not the least of her poetry’s attraction is the personality which it intimately reveals. Poetry of her quality, written from a woman’s point of view, is sufficiently rare to make it doubly welcome in this country.
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