In “Above the Oxbow,” Sylvia writes a rather beautiful description of a very real place. She was never incapable of writing more conventionally---she chose the road less taken.
Watch her use of language; I find this passage oddly reminiscent of GM Hopkins.
Above the Oxbow
Here in this valley of discrete academies
We have not mountains, but mounts, truncated hillocks
To the Adirondacks, to northern Monadnock,
Themselves mere rocky hillocks to an Everest.
Still, they're out best mustering of height: by
Comparison with the sunnken silver-grizzled
Back of the Connecticut, the river-level
Flats of Hadley farms, they're lofty enough
Elevations to be called something more than hills.
Green, wholly green, they stand their knobby spine
Against our sky: they are what we look southward to
Up Pleasant Street at Main. Poising their shapes
Between the snuff and red tar-paper apartments,
They mound a summer coolness in our view.
To people who live in the bottom of valleys
A rise in the landscape, hummock or hogback, looks
To be meant for climbing. A peculiar logic
In going up for the coming down if the post
We start at's the same post we finish by,
But it's the clear conversion at the top can hold
Us to the oblique road, in spite of a fitful
Wish for even ground, and it's the last cliff
Ledge will dislodge out cramped concept of space, unwall
Horizons beyond vision, spill vision
After the horizons, stretching the narrowed eye
To full capacity. We climb to hopes
Of such seeing up the leaf-shuttered escarpments,
Blindered by green, under a green-grained sky
Into the blue. Tops define themselves as places
Where nothing higher's to be looked to. Downward looks
Follow the black arrow-backs of swifts on their track
Of the air eddies' loop and arc though air's at rest
To us, since we see no leaf edge stir high
Here on a mount overlaid with leaves. The paint-peeled
Hundred-year-old hotel sustains its ramshackle
Four-way veranda, view-keeping above
The fallen timbers of its once remarkable
Funicular railway, witness to gone
Time, and to graces gone with the time. A state view-
Keeper collects half-dollars for the slopes
Of state scenery, sells soda, shows off viewpoints.
A ruffy skylight oaints the gray oxbow
And paints the river's pale circumfluent stillness.
As roses broach their carmine in a mirror. Flux
Of the desultory currents --- all that unique
Stripple of shifting wave-tips is ironed out, lost
In the simplified orderings of sky-
Lorded perspectives. Maplike, the far fields are ruled
By correct green lines and no seedy free-for-all
Of asparagus heads. Cars run their suave
Colored beads on the strung roads, and the people stroll
Straightforwardly across the springing green.
All's peace and discipline down there. Till lately we
Lived under the shadow of hot rooftops
And never saw how coolly we might move. For once
A high hush quietens the crickets' cry.
Though Sylvia preferred the inner imagery for her subject matter, she was just as capable as writing more on more 'conventional' themes as her surreal ones. She was, like other lady poets, writing against a language, a heritage, a tradition that held her at arm's length, if not in contempt. Stylistically, you can't ague against the craft and depth of her work. Her anti-Romantic originality is obvious. However, what I can critique is that difficulty of translating the language of her interior world into something truthful in everyone's experience. She makes the mistake of Anne Sexton, even of Dickinson---in being so true to the interior voice that we, as readers, are left on the outside. I want to be let in. Maybe the lack I feel is because each of these ladies, in their own way, had psychological issues that, they were ultimately the victims of.
So, as a reader of poetry, and as a lady poet, what can I learn?
Avoid similar tendencies? That sounds a little trite. These are the habits of brilliant women. I can only dream of making the same mistakes. However, I have noticed that my poetry can be 'Gothic'---maybe---but definitely a hard read. While I would love to be brilliant, I would prefer to be soulful. Maybe that's compromising my art (whatever that is), but hell, compromise, is what you do in any relationship. And that's what I see poetry as being: a dialogue, a conversation, a promise. If it end with me, then it doesn't really begin.
Female Author
All day she plays at chess with the bones of the world:
Favored (while suddenly the rains begin
Beyond the window) she lies on cushions curled
And nibbles an occasional bonbon of sin.
Prim, pink-breasted, feminine, she nurses
Chocolate fancies in rose-papered rooms
Where polished higboys whisper creaking curses
And hothouse roses shed immortal blooms.
The garnets on her fingers twinkle quick
And blood reflects across the manuscript;
She muses on the odor, sweet and sick,
Of festering gardenias in a crypt,
And lost in subtle metaphor, retreats
From gray child faces crying in the streets.
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