Writing to a good friend on November 22, 1817, the twenty-two-year-old John Keats dismisses the idea that “Worldly Happiness” is something that can be sought after or arrived at. “I scarcely remember counting upon any Happiness—I look not for it if it be not in the present hour—nothing startles me beyond the Moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights—or if a Sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel.” This passage anticipates the brilliant conception of Negative Capability that Keats describes to his brothers a month later, and points to a distinctive attribute of a poet’s temperament: the ability to stand outside oneself. We find this ek-stasis in the best poetry, not the ecstasy of the mystic but the imaginative and sensual engagement of the poet in the present moment and the immediate world around them.
This passionate quality of attention is one of the most striking aspects of a Laura Newbern poem. In “Madonna of the Meadow,” the opening poem of A Night in the Country, you can feel the clarity of her focus. Looking at a sequence of Giovanni Bellini’s paintings of the Madonna and Child, she shows in brief, expressive details how the outside world haltingly enters his cloistered compositions, “Until at last, in 1500, he brings the girl / and her burden outside, onto a field.” Newbern doubles back as she refines her vision. “He calls it a meadow, but there are hardly flowers”; by describing faithfully what she sees, imagination becomes an active part of her looking. Newbern sketches an oblique portrait of the painter by tracing his work, and subtly a more interior world opens in the poem’s conclusion:
He calls it a meadow, but there are hardly flowers,
and the clouds look like smoke belched
from the smokestacks—
but those are the trees. She wears
no halo. Holds the child there. Or rather
balances him, in her blue lap, where he seems
to sleep the sleep of an old man lost
at sea, and not in a meadow, not in a field at all.
Bellini tests his faith against the world by stages, and the poem’s speaker knows this same anxiety. The poem combines a deeply empathic imagination with keen intelligence.
A Night in the Country is Newbern’s second collection, winner of the 2023 Changes Book Prize (formerly the Bergman Prize), selected and with a foreword by Louise Glück—one of the last critical essays she completed. In 2010, Newbern’s Love and the Eye was chosen by Claudia Rankine for the Kore Press First Book Award. This new collection is more confident and cohesive, and fully captures Newbern’s distinctive voice. This year, Newbern won the Georgia Author of the Year Award for a full-length poetry collection.
Newbern interrogates other paintings and other painters here, but the artist most scrutinized is the poet herself, including memories of family and four different “Self-Portraits” with totemic animals. In “Self-Portrait with Water Rat,” Newbern envisions her French ancestors who settled the western shore of the Mississippi River that became Arkansas, “gamblers and lawyers, farmers and / owners of stores.” At its core, this poem (and many others in the book) questions America’s heritage of violence rooted in the land. In “Asylum Pastoral, or, Happiness,” the speaker sits alone, addressing a lover from the derelict grounds of what was once the largest mental asylum in the world, located in Milledgeville, Georgia—the town where Newbern has taught for many years. Even there, she rescues a moment of tenderness, recalling how she read aloud to him from a story by Chekhov. The poet alternates between images from the story and the landscape that surrounds her in the present. “Here, across the big lawn, and over the dome, the gray in the sky / is expanding”: the rain that threatens in Chekhov’s fictional world will soon fall “all over Georgia” as Newbern cherishes “one moment’s happiness—last night I read / to you,” like the breeze that comes before the rain.
Newbern finds inspiration in many kinds of writing, including novels, fables, and myths; “Novella”—a poem in couplets—has the candor and compression of a Chekhov short story. “What if I dreamed of a plane that flew / onto a road” begins “The Walk,” where memory and imagination become fused in precise images—like the white dress gloves she once wore as a child. She identifies with “the spindliest tree” beyond the airplane’s window, “like something / my grandfather on his long walk / might’ve brushed past, in his / waxed jacket.” In the dream, the poet senses the distance that separates her from those she loves, “the window too thick / for sound” to reach her grandfather outside.
This feeling of displacement casts an aura over several poems, perhaps most movingly in the book’s title piece. It opens with Newbern’s urge to hone the language, to make an image more exact:
Last night—mild, September—
my friend of twenty years strung lights
in a forest of cedars.
Not quite a forest—a gathering of trees
This first stanza sets a scene: a memorial party for a friend’s mother now one year gone, people gathering under those trees. The speaker’s recollection is prompted by a mention of the original Quaker settlers who had been driven away from the land where others now stood, and her imagination picks up this narrative thread. The grief that shadows the present occasion becomes almost palpable in the ghostly forms of “Quakers, there / in their gray frocks, walking the worn paths / still to be seen under the cedars.”
Newbern’s poems often occupy this liminal space, as in a doorway, where the interior world of the speaker’s imagination and the physical world around her meet. She knows that we all share this Janus-like nature, as in “Black Forest,” which begins:
Sometimes my mind goes back to certain things.
Like everyone’s.
Like to the woman who asked me
What keeps you awake at night?
When the poem’s speaker treats her question literally, rather than giving “a writerly, magical answer” as the woman expects, their conversation takes a hard turn, as do the speaker’s thoughts:
I wanted to bind her with rope.
I wanted to watch her struggle, if just for a minute.
The mind goes back, the heart goes with it, the forest
whirls all around. Instead
I was kind to her husband, whose life
had had something to do with flight.
There are many kinds of humor in these lines, with the same exactness of perception (“if just for a minute”), and the pivot between inner and outer worlds (“Instead”). And Newbern’s response—to sympathize with the visiting writer’s husband—is again a characteristic impulse.
Simone Weil wrote that one of the fundamental religious truths, “a truth that goes almost unrecognized today, is that looking is what saves us.” A quality of spiritual intensity animates the looking in Newbern’s poems, a sense of being startled in the moment. As readers, we want poetry that inspires us to see more clearly and to recognize in the lives of others our own experiences and affections. And when a poet earns our trust, each poem can feel like a gift, for the care and precision of its language—its craft—and for the shared intimacy of all that close looking. The poems in Laura Newbern’s A Night in the Country are that good. They are haunted, as Louise Glück writes, by “poetry’s impossible objectives—permanence, the dream of perfection.”
_____
A Night in the Country. By Laura Newbern, with a foreword by Louise Glück. New York: Changes Press, 2024. 66 pp. $18.99.
