Rosemary Herbert is a writer whose work spans genres. Her poetry chapbook, Sisters in Time, will be published by Finishing Line Press in 2026, and her poem “Grave Finds” was named “Noteworthy” in the 2024 Coniston Prize competition. This work is centered on her experience unearthing a pagan burial in a fourth-century, Roman-era cemetery in Winchester, England. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Radar Poetry, The Last Milkweed: An Autumnal Anthology of Poetry (Tupelo Press), GRIFFEL, Remembering William Butler Yeats (Moonstone Arts Center), Tiny Seed Literary Journal and their Poetry of the Wild Flowers anthology, and elsewhere. She contributed interviews to The Paris Reviewand Harvard Review. Her eight books include the Edgar Award-nominated The Oxford Companion to Crime & Mystery Writing; A New Omnibus of Crime; The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories; Whodunit? A Who’s Who in Crime & Mystery Writing; Twelve American Crime Stories; Murder on Deck! Shipboard & Shoreline Mystery Stories; Front Page Teaser: A Liz Higgins Mystery; andThe Fatal Art of Entertainment: Interviews with Mystery Writers. Her opening scene for a thriller, “A Man in the House,” was selected by Scottish crime-writing luminary Val McDermid for inclusion in CrimeBits2: 100 Opening Gambits for Great Thrillers & Linked Mystery Puzzles. The book is forthcoming from Black Spring Press in the UK in August 2025, and in the US in November 2025. She served as a reference librarian at Harvard University’s Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library, as book review editor and garden columnist at the Boston Herald, and she worked at the Portland Press Herald and in several newsrooms. Her book reviews have been published in the New York Times Book Review, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Minneapolis Star Tribune, and more. She is also a photographer whose author portraits appear on many books. A native of Long Island, New York, and longtime New Englander, she now resides in Akron, Ohio, where she also pursues ceramic arts.
Jeffrey Levine: Marie Howe writes that poetry is “a cup of language to hold what can’t be said,” and I agree that the most memorable poems both begin and end in that unsayable realm. Think of Elizabeth Bishop’s Questions of Travel, or of Emily Dickinson entire oeuvre; poets who inhabit wonder, perplexity, and otherness. Much of your own career has been devoted to mystery, but as a genre—where the work aimed at uncovering the what, when, where, why and—of course—the who. Poetry, as you know, tends to move quite differently. So many of those coordinates remain unknown. I’m curious how it feels to enter the terrain of poetry, where meaning emerges not from resolution but from sustained unknowing, and where the poem must find ways to fully inhabit what remains hidden.
Rosemary Herbert: I love this question, Jeffrey, as it provides me the chance to say that while for many crime and mystery writers it is essential to know from the outset precisely where the narrative is going – the who, when, where, how, and why — this is not so for me. My approaches in both the whodunit and poetry require a kind of sleuthing in quest of the unknown. I never know at the start, in either genre, entirely what the outcome will be. In that regard, entering the terrain of poetry does not feel especially foreign. And in both cases, I hope this process of discovery remains evident in the finished mystery or poem, so that the reader may join me in my treading like a gumshoe does, with a kind of stealth and wonderment, to point to truth that was not evident, even to the writer, at the outset.
Of course, the writer of the traditional mystery story is tasked with providing a tidy resolution, with all loose ends tied up, and everything, including human motive, made explicable. But, for me, motive is not the same as motivation, a more elusive quality that hovers in the corners of the grand room where all the suspects are gathered to hear the detective lay out the crime’s solution. There is always the lingering question of why one person acts on a motive with deadly results and another does not. In motivation the real mystery resides, and no sleuth’s magnifying glass is up to clarifying that. And so, there is always an element of the unknowable in even the most tidily resolved crime plots. And no matter how intimately linked the sleuth may be to the community, the work of discovery always demands a certain degree of “otherness.”
Speaking of grand rooms, I keep thinking of the world of poetry not so much as a landscape or terrain entered through a looking glass, but as a vast ballroom where the walls are hung with looking glasses that mirror each other across the dance floor. How can one say anything but a breathless “yes” to the invitation to partner with the unresolved, to make something that moves with it? As the poet seeks to grasp something in mind or heart through the act of writing, factual resolution is not demanded of her, and this is liberating. It is also challenging, because it is so vital in poetry to “hold the unspeakable,” as Marie Howe says, within the work.
JL: I sense that you have a good deal of confidence stepping more earnestly into the world of poetry. What does confidence this stem from?
RJ: No matter what the genre, I am no wallflower. What I find remarkable is my confidence, across genres, that I can start out without the least clarity of how a crime story will be resolved or how a poem will do-si-do with the unknown, and still feel certain that the pathway to each, paved with language, will lead me to somewhere new and worth my while. Then, of course, (I’m smiling as I write) humility must prevail, while the task is to evaluate how nimbly, musically, and competently this has been done — and whether it’s worth the reader’s while, too. Naturally, some pieces are blundering missteps, but of course one learns from every stumble.
This confidence is a gift that I earned during a lifetime of manipulating and, yes, playing with words, not only in crime writing and poetry, but in the newsroom, where clarity and verve were required on deadline. I have served as book review editor, garden columnist, copy editor, and editor on several newspapers. There is no room for fussing about in the newsroom. But there is room for liveliness of language! This may at first seem less high-flown or erudite than many experiences recounted by poets, but I can tell you that each morning when I arrived at the Boston Herald newsroom, it was eye opening to cut the plastic ties binding stacks of fresh-off-the-presses newspapers — in this case the tabloid Boston Herald and competing broadsheet Boston Globe — and, with fingers smeared with still-damp ink, scrutinize how the same news event was headlined and reported by each. I play with this experience repeatedly in my novel, Front Page Teaser: A Liz Higgins Mystery. But whether it’s examining contrasting news stories or much more elevated writing, the daily experience of paying attention to language as a living thing that can deliver information as well as stir the emotions is a priceless gift to a writer. And it cannot be underestimated how greatly it aids in mastering the power of word choice, when the headline writer must encapsulate a big notion in a few words, in just minutes.
JL: Throughout your admirable career, you have earned some fame and notoriety, and, as I said, in devotion to a far more popular genre: the kind upon which bookstores lavish some of their most important retail space, because so many people love to read mysteries. Poets, on the other hand, get used to the fact that our books tend to live lives of quiet isolation. What impelled you to turn to poetry rather than, say, fiction, essay, or memoir to treat your experience on the archeological dig?
RH: Ever since I was five years old, and the words “Run. Run. Run.” made both sound and sense to me as a new reader, I have been impelled by the same thought. Wonderstruck at the realization that someone, somewhere, (who knows where ?!) had written those words, and right there, in the storybook in my lap, I could read them and know what they meant, I thought, “That’s for me! I want to be the person who makes this happen.” Achieving this does demand reaching readers. I am not alone in devoting time that otherwise would go to composing and refining new work to building as best I can a presence on social media and setting up other promotional gambits. I hasten to add that this is necessary even for work in a genre that wins more bookstore shelf space. (I still have my foot in the crime and mystery genre, having just had an opening scene for a thriller published in CrimeBits2: 100 Opening Gambits for Great Thrillers & Linked Mystery Puzzles.)
As for turning to poetry to treat my experience in archeology, I can only say that poetry found me. When I sat down to write about the archeological dig, it was with prose in mind. I had all kinds of experiences and scenes and emotions, along with a marvelous assortment of recollected grave finds, to describe. But when I set down the words, “Blazing Britain,’ the tabloid headlines scream,” the iambs took over and my crown of sonnets — “A Crown for the Skeleton Crew” — followed. As I wrote more poems centered on the dig, I found that the soundscape of Winchester – the cathedral bells, the whoosh and burble of the River Itchen, even the music played on an old transistor radio – resounded in my mind. Such an asset to a poet!
JL: Your book of poetry, Sisters in Time, digs into the notion of excavation in and of many realms, from ancient civilizations to personal ties, from the natural world to the numinous. I understand that you grew up on Long Island Sound, that estuary reaching all the way from New York City to New Haven to Montauk Point and the Atlantic Ocean. Long Island itself is one vast archaeological and geological treasure trove. In fact, as I understand it, the fossil record on Long Island dates back 145 years to the Cretaceous period. What, if anything, about your early years on Long Island inspired your interest in excavation, in artifacts, in piecing together the past? What has this very particular interest helped you to discover in the process of writing the poems in this new book?
RH: It only took a bicycle ride requiring pumping the pedals hard to reach the tops of steep hills to prove what our science teachers told us in class. Long Island is a land pushed down by a glacier from the north so hard that it broke off from the mainland (that was later to become Connecticut and Rhode Island) to form a fish-shaped island with a northern edge comprised of mounds of glacial moraine. That north shore was where I lived with my family in a winterized summer bungalow, and yes, it was where I beachcombed and collected seashells, rocks, and pebbles galore. It seems to me fitting, given how my writing life so lends itself to bringing a mix of experiences together in one whole, that conglomerate rocks were my favorite. When you brought them to school with others in your egg carton, they were the most laborious to label, but how neat it was to have several stones in one.
I can’t say that I found many fossils, if any, but there were those living companions of the deep – horseshoe crabs – that certainly provided a sense of the prehistoric. As a child prone to rumination, I recall noticing how ordinary, everyday, this-moment life went on, with likely no one except me feeling aware of the deep past that I saw in the blue-blooded horseshoe crabs that bumbled across the harbor bottom or sometimes swam upside down there. That sense of being at a juncture in time, and of my own alertness to it marking a kind of otherness in me, has always stayed with me. It was absolutely something I experienced during the archeological dig where even while we washed centuries-old bones, someone played pop music on the aforementioned transistor radio, an Irish archeologist spooked us with tea leaf readings, and young people flirted and laughed at one another’s jokes. That living on not just the cusp but at the crux of two worlds – at a crossroads in time – is the keystone in the narrative arc of Sisters in Time. For this I point to “Sisters in Time,” “Grave Finds,” “A Crown for the Skeleton Crew,” “Familiarity breeds the blasé” and “The Washing of the Bones” in my book.
JL: In a career centered in the world of books and writing, how did the opportunity to work on an archeological dig present itself?
RH: It was an overload of books, literally, that led me there. My intention during the summer of my twenty-third year was to make my way to St. Ives in Cornwall, to see the lighthouse that inspired Virginia Woolf. In a London youth hostel, though, the warden exclaimed, “Such a literary goal! But you really must not miss visiting one of our cathedral cities. On your route is Salisbury Cathedral, with its gorgeous spire and, for the booklover, associations with Trollope. And then there’s Winchester Cathedral, where Jane Austen is buried. Both would suit you, I think, but when it comes to youth hostels, Winchester’s is far and away the best, as it’s located inside the historic City Mill. You will fall asleep to the sound of the River Itchen flowing beneath the floorboards.”
How could I resist Winchester? Arriving there in the heart of a sunny summer morning, impossibly overburdened with a backpack stuffed with books that I had acquired in London, I was crestfallen to find that it was not possible to drop off my backpack at the youth hostel until 5 pm. There was nothing for it but to lug the thing to the lawn outside Winchester Cathedral where I would have to spend some six hours in gazing at the building and indulging in my lifelong passion for writing postcards.
As I lingered there, I was enchanted to see a housewife crossing the path with a wicker basket over her arm. It seemed like the kind of thing a character would carry in an English novel. Perhaps it was my bemused smile that attracted the woman to stop and chat with me. When she learned that I was bound to my backpack for the duration, she declared that I really could not be sitting there all day without entering the cathedral, hence, she would sit with my backpack while I ventured in. I had to promise her that I would spend at least half an hour inside. When I returned, she strode off to accomplish her errands. Later, she returned, this time with a container of hot tea and a Banbury cake for me. (Like something from a nursery rhyme!) Hungry, thirsty, delighted, and grateful, I asked why she would be so kind to me. Her answer: “I have a daughter who gets herself into these kinds of charming fixes, and I can only that hope others are equally kind to her.”
It was perhaps more predictable that I would catch the attention of a someone in my own age group, and it was a young American fellow who chatted me up next. I expressed so much interest in his account of working on a fourth-century, Roman-era archeological dig in Winchester, that he suggested I meet the dig team and its leader that evening in a pub, in case I might be invited join the effort. I was indeed taken on, and after one glorious night falling asleep to the sounds of the River Itchen flowing beneath the City Mill youth hostel, I was given lodgings with the dig team in a former chocolate factory just outside the cathedral close, and a small stipend. This allowed me to spend the rest of that summer in Winchester.
The dig team’s lodgings were set not only in the heart of the city, but in the center of the soundscape there, where once a week, magnificent changes were rung on the cathedral bells. As a new recruit at the dig site, where there were more than ninety Roman-era, Christian graves, I was assigned an unpromising, irregular-looking plot that turned out to contain the only pagan burial found there thus far. It held pottery and more interred with a woman who had likely died at around my own age sixteen centuries earlier. Call it serendipity. Call it a “charming fix.” All I know is that it was a gift to a writer, more replete with literary – and as it turned out, poetic — possibility than even a visit to Virginia Woolf’s lighthouse could ever be.
JL: Your book features many, many poems in form. There are, of course, many current practitioners of the formal poem, with its received notions of structure and balance, who have geologic interests. A.E. Stallings comes to mind, as well as Annie Finch. This said, contemporary poets seem to be moving away from what some might describe as the constraints of the formal poem toward all manner of experimentation and hybridization. And yet the compelling crown of sonnets that takes a bow early on in your extraordinary book seems somehow to transcend the perceived constraints, if you will, of the sonnet form. This seems to me in large part due to your very musical ear. But I’m wondering, to what extent if at all do you find writing in form constraining, and perhaps more interestingly, to what extent do you find it liberating? One thinks of the way that the formal line exerts a kind of pressure on both ends of the line, a pressure that generates friction, a kind of poetic heat. Structurally induced dramatic tension, we might call it. Is generating this sort of heat a conscious goal that leads to writing in form, or is it “merely” a necessary byproduct?
RH: I am deeply pleased that you find my crown of sonnets to be compelling. I see “A Crown for the Skeleton Crew” as melding my efforts in both narrative and poetry. Your notion of constraints in formal poetry calls to mind tightly laced “stays.” Far from feeling corseted by form and meter, I feel as unloosed by it as some heroine in a bodice ripper. Dare I say it? It comes readily to me. I am at ease with form and meter, especially iambic pentameter, driven by it, and sprightly of mind within it.
I am of the same mind with Brad Leitheiser, who writes, in Rhyme’s Rooms; The Architecture of Poetry: “What matters is the underlying vastness, the abysmal depths of possibility,” He’s referring to the thousands of ways “to configure a simple quatrain.” But beyond any kind of enumeration of possibilities, there is the sense of freedom within the sonnet form that, for me, invites romping. Decisions that need to be made in other verse (how long to make the line, to rhyme or not to rhyme, and so much more) are made for me. I can focus on diction and musicality and so much more.
As for your stirring notion of “the friction and poetic heat that is generated in a formal line”: One wants to strip down and bask in that warmth. But as you imply, creating that poetic heat must first be achieved. Looking back on the writing of “A Crown for the Skeleton Crew,” I recall that my overriding feeling was delight in seeing how the experience that I had fully expected to address in prose was such a natural fit for not just a single sonnet but seven. I felt decidedly at ease with this. And playful. Annie Finch’s observation in The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self that “Meters bring words and ideas along with them, more than the other way around” resonates with me. I would add that some meters can bring a certain gravitas – which can notably be found in the work of A.E. Stallings — that might be more elusive without it. And yes, form can certainly generate “poetic heat” not only thanks to the tension that is inherent in the structure, but particularly in a crown of sonnets, in the momentum that I feel as I circle through the sequence. I must say that seeking to generate “poetic heat” was something that I sought far more consciously to achieve in poems that were not supported by form, as in “Familiarity breeds the blasé.”
If writing sonnets with an ear attuned to iambic pentameter is, for me, nothing short of self-delighting, this is not to imply that there is no sober work to do in revision. I find revising requires standing back from the drive that stays with me so steadfastly that I must resist it. Only then can I effectively evaluate whether this being at ease with the form leads to sloppy easiness of rhyme, rhythm, or diction. Meanwhile, in turning to a form like traditional haiku, I absolutely do feel constraint, but I embrace the challenge that it presents, not just in form but of course in the brevity and special mission of haiku, which I see as a quest for the timeless.
Regarding sonnets, throughout my adult life, I have written what I think of as received poetry, mostly writing crowns of sonnets that seem to arrive in brainstorms, unbidden, out of the upper right-hand corner of my mind. This kind of thing has always come to me in iambic pentameter. And not surprisingly, most of my early crowns circled around questions of love and loss, before they expanded to take on the ecstatic, as in carnal love, and even the humorous. I believe “A Crown for the Skeleton Crew,” which is the first piece that I wrote in the collection that would become Sisters in Time, has taken me deeper into what a crown of sonnets can do on multiple levels. I enjoyed working in enough information about the archeological experience and grave finds to put the reader in the picture, as I introduced the themes that I hoped would resound in more poems that already whispered to be written.
Aside from sonnets, my poetry tends to begin as a kind of yearning to find my way through an emotional state by means of words. I would say that my haiku and unmetered poems tend to be engendered in rumination, unlike any received poems. Poems like this ultimately find me in concert with my seeking them. An example in Sisters in Time is “Destiny.” In this chapbook about my experience unearthing and connecting across sixteen centuries with a young pagan woman, I knew my work would not be complete without my somehow expressing the pagan’s own consciousness and point of view. But as I wrote about her with growing reverence, I felt it might be presumptuous, disrespectful, preposterous, or even — God forbid — silly to put thoughts in her head or words in her mouth.
Remarkably, there was so much I did know about her, from her burial and the grave finds that were interred with her. Most importantly, I knew that she was loved. But crucially, there was the question of her inner life. It was not her grave that drew me as I sought to find her point of view; instead, it was the unchanged landscape of her world, now mine, especially the River Itchen and its water meadows overlooked by St. Catherine’s Hill. I felt certain that we both loved this place, where I had followed her in my own strolls and explorations sixteen centuries after hers, and where she kept leading me in my poetry. It was when I saw her in my mind’s eye standing thigh-deep in the River Itchen, pinning up her hair with the bone hairpin that I had found in her grave, that her world and my world became ours. It was only then, in a spirit of reverence, that I was ready to let her glean her own unknowable in the poem — her poem — “Destiny.”
JL: I’m quite taken by the deep wisdom revealed not so much by as within so many of your poems. I feel like they have much to teach me. This got me thinking about the great Danish theologian and philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who wrote somewhere, and I paraphrase, life must be lived forward, but it can only be understood backward. What is it about coming to poetry rather late in life (forgive me, I think that we’re nearly the same age) that helps you to better understand the life you have lived, where you come from, what you know about inhabiting this earth all too briefly, where, as ever, “summer’s lease hath all too short a date.” What does writing poetry teach you about understanding the lives of others, or what you have come to know about the world? Huge questions, of course. Unpack as you will.
RH: While I have written what I have called received poems for most of my life, it is true that I only recently turned my focus to working in earnest on poetry. I savor so many aspects of not just aging but becoming older, grabbing hold of a consciousness of just what you point to in Kierkegaard’s thinking, that priceless opportunity to understand life backward. For a poet, pinning down – or lifting up – that understanding in words is an obvious draw. For me, drawing on a lifetime of writing in so many realms, I take special joy in what you, Jeffrey, have called “the compliant alphabet.”
When I was a child, I occasionally felt a keen intensity of awareness in the most ordinary of moments, for instance, while sitting in a battered wicker chair on our front porch, with nothing more noticeable happening than a squirrel rustling the rhododendrons. I saw these hyper-aware experiences as “moments of being,” and I felt a strange certainty that they would never leave me. I’m here to tell you that they accompany me to this day. In poetry, there is the opportunity to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, like that. And for the late-life poet, there is the chance to act on new understandings, to celebrate, to atone, to forgive – and most satisfyingly — to give life in words to what abides.
With Sisters in Time, the extraordinary was in the nature of the archeological experience every day. I needed no “moments of being” to enhance this. It would have been cool, so to speak, to have written about the dig at any time of my life. But had I written Sisters in Time when I was young, or even middle-aged, it would have been a different and I think lesser book. Here, I am especially aware of the maturity it took, even now, to find my way to the pagan woman’s point of view.
When I was a teenager, my creative writing teacher, Mr. Alfred Haulenbeek, did me the great service of taking me seriously. He also told me about Michael Drayton’s “fine madness,” and urged me to “grow in the command of fine language” and arrive at a point where, as Wordsworth put it, emotion could be “recollected in tranquility.” I wasn’t sure about the tranquility then, nor am I now, but I am certain about the importance of command of language and the perspective afforded by recollecting emotion from a distance in time.
JL: As I age, I find myself increasingly drawn to Eastern poetry—especially Kobayashi Issa. One haiku in particular stays with me: The world of dew is the world of dew, and yet. And yet. What moves me is less its statement than its pause—the silence that opens after the line, the sense that something essential is being withheld. I feel a related attentiveness in your poems, though often with more generosity and less sorrow than Issa’s. I’m curious how you think about those moments in your own work—where the poem leans toward what cannot quite be said—and whether there is a poem in the book where you feel you come closest to that edge.
RH: In my book of poems that rise and fall along a narrative arc, the incalculable shadow story whispers to me from the spaces between the poems. And I hope it dances in pairings and groupings that readers may sense, and that it invites circling from start to finish and around again, not just in the crown of sonnets, but in the chapbook in its entirety. I feel these whispers are echoed visually in Jaymi Zents’ cover art for my book, about which the Ohio artist said she discovered her images as much as they found her within the dreamy, complex grain of birchwood. Like me, she brings to her art a mission of reverent discovery.
I believe that paradoxically, I come closest to the unsayable in my most graspable, visceral lines, where readers can touch, taste, plunge into and even wring themselves out with words. I like to think that, just as it was for me throughout my own hands-on experience on the archeological dig, physical experience echoes sensationally the unsayable. In Sisters in Time, the feverish night in “Familiarity breeds the blasé,” the sponge wringing in “The Washing of the Bones,” and the guzzling in “Spangled in starlight” all sidle up to this “and yet. And yet.”