UConn Professor's Fifth Book of Poetry
Review by Wendy Herbert

Though Vivian Shipley, Connecticut State University Distinguished Professor and editor of the Connecticut Review, has titled her fifth poetry collection Crazy Quilt, it is far from a rag-tag assortment of scraps pieced together, as the name of that quiltmaker's form suggests. Instead, it is a careful fitting together of seemingly disparate elements in a virtuoso display of artistry. Though her subjects are often quotidian, evocative of the simple calicos stitched by her great-grandmother in Harlan County, Kentucky, Shipley's subtle renderings more closely resemble the lush velvets and silks embroidered in the Victorian crazy quilt.

Individual poems resonate with themes of familial closeness and loss, as if secured by these elements to a quilter's stout frame. Compassion and richness of detail bind the work's sections together, mirroring the complex stitchery that subtitles each. But unlike the predictable patterning seen in a "Star of Bethlehem," or a "Mariner's Compass," Shipley's Crazy Quilt includes bewilderment coupled with an examination of the dark side of humanity, prompting the reader to contemplate fabric irreparably damaged and impossible to preserve.

Though poems in previous collections such as Devil's Lane and Poems Out of Harlan County, have focused on family relationships, the selections here are infused with a greater sense of urgency and impending loss. The speaker's mother in "Mother's Day Brunch at Arden Court," and "02-14-99," has succumbed to Alzheimer's, leaving her daughter to wonder: If I hold out our communion of beaten biscuit and ham/in my palm, will she remember the taste?" In "Moonflower" the speaker contemplates the sorrow that will accompany the end of her father's life:

"Afternoons, asleep in his blue chair, my father is so still, I stand until I am sure paper whispers of lung rise and fall in an eggshell chest. When will I cover it in tattered shawl of rosebud from Howe Valley? By the spring, will I be a supplicant by the dogwood next to my father's grave, my hands palming air as its white petals do?"

In "The Dodo," 1999 winner of the So To Speak Poetry Prize, the speaker reassures her father, worried he's the last Shipley, that he will leave a legacy: "I remind/ my father he's like a bat who has the hang of dodging/ objects, how the love he will leave behind is more lasting/than a name, will stay, stuck like the bones, the quills of a porcupine he shot in our hickory tree."

Though the subjects' relationship is fraternal rather than familial, nowhere are Shipley's compassion and sense of richness more evident than in "Excerpts from T.S. Eliot's Birthday Letters to Ezra Pound in St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the Criminally Insane." With Shipley's voice, Eliot alternately praises and chides his friend, paying homage, in the third entry, to Pound's influence: "You slashed away at the poem I carried, badgered me into carving out I whole stanzas, pages from The Waste Land trying/to push up like fescue. Ezra, it was as if you held/ grass blades to your lips, whistled and one half of my poem followed, sentences flying out, ribbons on a pole."

To the second entry's imaginative details of Pound's life at St. Elizabeth's, Shipley renders her deepest compassion:

"What psychiatrists meant as madness in 1945 was not dementia, but your fury coupled with a mind skipping over what it knew. Down St. Elizabeth's main hall, just past security lights, hospital fans sigh, creating undetow that sucks air to where it is unbreathable. Cooled, it drops like mercury, dreams of your father, the U.S. Mint. Melting down gold, drawing crucibles, skimming, pouring molten light, I bring you birthday flame to slice blinds, yellowed wax on wood, worn to skin by your left foot under the table where you write."

In the eighth entry, Shipley begins to probe the dark side of humanity as Eliot expresses a devotee's bewildered frustration: "Even then, you were firing off instructions to/the world, through the world paid no attention, just like/ your friends who found you the same faithful Fascist,/ charming, unbearable, warmhearted, foulmouthed/ bigot, you are today." "Ezra, why can't I persuade you to repent for all those who came to the ovens/in numbers you could not imagine?"

She delves for culpability more deeply in "Perennial," 1999 winner of the Sara Henderson Hay Prize for Poetry as the speaker observes her neighbor of 18 years, a reputed former Nazi guard: "You lined gardens/ with day lilies I clumped, bordered them with hosta/ I shared. Each autumn, wind splayed our maple leaves/ like shoes, hair carved into piles by guards as if dividing/ beef: shank, loin, flank, round. I want to know what/ you remember, shoveling clay from rock, sprinkling/ bone meal like holy water on snow drops."

Like the quilter who collects and preserves remnants of cloth, keeping those too precious to discard, and reminding us of others that cannot be saved, Shipley has crafted her experiences and memories, transforming them into a unique and affecting work of art.