Margaret Rockwell Finch’s fourth and final book, Crone’s Wines: Late Poems, is something rare and precious. A book by a woman who started life as a poet, reciting her first poem to her mother at age four: “I come from the sun. I come to fly!” (xiv). Finch wanted to be a poet, but marriage and children interrupted those plans. In her later years—divorced and with children now full-grown—she returned to her passion with enough poems to fill four books. Finch’s poems deserve a wider audience and more acclaim. Crone’s Wines is deliciously complex and formally playful.
Crone’s Wines draws on deep poetic traditions. There are the metrically strict, simply-rhymed poems that seem light but reach deep—very similar to the work of Teasdale:
Our moon beyond the hill
Already set—
Our sun across the lake
Not risen yet—
[...]Might not angels, at their ease,
Forgive our debt? (13).
Then, there are the Hopkinsesque poems that link nature to the divine such as these lines from “The Springing Sun:” “I have come here where all desires / Lack substance, lack concern. [...] And feeling sun upon my back / Is all I need to know” (7). There are poems that show Millay’s style and humor, such as “On the Various Levels of Pleasure:” “Who better can enjoy what truly matters, / Than one who suffered through a life in tatters?” (15). One also sees Bogan’s creativity with meter. Much of metrical poetry is dominated by a single line length, but Bogan and Finch love to stretch and shrink. Both poets rotate pentameter and trimeter lines in their poems, and both poets use the rare dimeter line to great effect.
What sets Finch apart? What does she add to these poetic traditions? Finch’s unique strength lies in her play with formal and metrical expectations. She will bend or break meter and form entirely to emphasize a crucial moment in a poem. The most frequent example of this are her near-sonnets. In its 138 pages, Crone’s Wines has 18 sonnets and almost as many near-sonnets. In her poem about the Virginia Tech Shooting, “After News of a Massacre, 2007,” in which she uses the metaphor of a bird tossed in from a storm, she breaks form at the volta:
At my window caught
In worlds of twisted pride
Unnatural deaths, dear bought
In agonies I hide
But cannot.
Now—my thought
To call her safe inside:
I fling my casement wide. (6)
She breaks the iambic trimeter meter at “but cannot.” She is so disturbed that she cannot hide, cannot finish the line, cannot continue with the form or the meter. She makes a new stanza as she breaks the fourth wall, announcing the concluding couplet that we knew was coming: “Now—my thought.” She has set the sonnet stage with a detailed description and now she announces her commentary. As in the line above, it is as though she is too distraught to continue the poem as such. She gives up, drops meter, form, metaphor, even convention, and speaks to us instead. Even the couplet, though it returns to the poem’s iambic trimeter meter, is broken. The fourteenth line stands alone. It’s as if she needs a pause to consider if she will open the window. The second half of the couplet standing alone could just as easily emphasize her solitude or perhaps it denotes the separation of loved ones from the dead. However we choose to read it, that final line standing alone is powerful. The way she breaks meter and form, the way she plays with the reader’s expectations is unique and effective.
Her many nonce forms marry form and content in equally inventive and powerful ways. Her preferred literary devices are varying metrical line lengths, repetition of words or phrases, and rhyme scheme. Her poem about the cycles of life and death, “The Three Mothers” (133) is an excellent example. The three quatrains each stand for a different phase of life: a fetus in utero, life on earth, and death underground. The first stanza establishes the pattern:
I lay inside my darling mother
Warm embraced the sun of her womb,
Content to hear the seed of her singing
And thread my loom.
The meter is iambic pentameter for the first three lines and iambic dimeter for the final line of each stanza. This descending pattern mirrors the ending of each phase of life. The first line of each stanza is a version of “I lay inside my darling mother.” Each third line begins “Content to.” Each final line begins with “And” followed by a verb. The repetition of these phrases highlights the similarities of each phase and emphasizes the divine feminine who, in the second and third stanzas, is represented with the capitalization of “Mother” and “Her.” Even the simple, single-syllable xaxa rhyme scheme is doing important work in the poem. The rhymes are not arbitrary. Each one emphasizes critical aspects of the cycle: “womb” and “loom” represent growth and creation. Stanza two uses an eye-rhyme: “move” and “love” to emphasize these two important aspects of life. And finally, in death, leaves “fall” on the speaker while she awaits “Her [Mother’s] call.” Waiting for the call while already dead implies that this cycle will begin again, which adds another layer of meaning to the repetition in the poem.
Finch can be an elusive writer. There are passages, and even entire poems, that left me guessing as to her meaning. There is an interview in the beginning of this book, and in it she is playful, evasive and sarcastic. I find some of her poems to be the same. I sometimes felt that she was just behind the page with a sly smile on her face, enjoying my guesswork, my careful scansion, my notation of rhyme, repetition and punctuation. This is a woman who enjoyed the thrill of a secret. Often this secretiveness, and her use of the liminal in general, adds to her poems by providing the complexity of multiple interpretations.
These poems stuck with me long after I read them. I would re-read them and try to pin them down. Sometimes meaning surfaced and sometimes it did not. These poems hold their own, but given the many decades she was unable to hone her craft because she was raising children, running a household, and being a wife, these poems are miracles.
Autumn Newman writes poetry and book reviews. Her work has appeared in Colorado Review, CALYX Press, Pleiades, River Heron Review and others. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her chapbook, A Flower Burst Open, is available from Finishing Line Press.