The Books: Zero Meridian, by Deborah Warren

Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry:

Zero Meridian: Poems (New Criterion), poems by Deborah Warren

The formation of a writer occurs in many ways, but a fine teacher can reveal a poet in the way a sculptor finds the statue within the stone. At a formative time in her life, Deborah Warren and her connection with Miss Florence Hunt helped form this adolescent poet in her writing, poetry and prose. Keats, particularly the Odes, infused her memory; perhaps Warren’s examinations of time and dimension have their origins in “Ode to a Nightingale”. As Warren’s high school poetic foundation moved from Keats toward Tennyson, she became cognizant of a more modern diction, further drawn to meter. Tennyson’s tribute “To Virgil” speaks of meter, “. . . Though thine ocean-roll of rhythm / sound forever of Imperial Rome–“.

At fifteen she selected the sophisticated “Woman from the Washington Zoo” by Randall Jarrell for a memorization assignment, an unusual, yet not surprising choice by this young woman. In her career as a poet, this early influence of Jarrell appears, as Warren often guides the unsuspecting reader to unimagined turns and endings.
— The Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline: Deborah Warren

Deborah Warren’s poem “Zero Meridian” was featured one day on Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac, and I liked the poem so much I bought the collection immediately. I knew nothing about her. That is rare for me. As should be obvious if you have been following along with these Poetry posts, I’m not that much into modern poetry. I prefer the greats from the past. However, sometimes someone comes along whose work pierces me, or strikes me as original, or … whatever, that one poem seemed to speak to me. Warren has a really interesting background. She’s a scholar of Latin (one of her main areas of study in school) – and that interest shows in her work. Lots of Latin. She also was a software engineer for 10 years. She lives on a farm in Massachusetts (they raise heifers) and she and her husband have nine children.

Zero Meridian is her second volume of poetry and it won the New Criterion Poetry Prize. Her work has been published all over the place. She only has been writing poetry for about 14 years, she came to it late. At her parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, she was asked to write a poem for the celebration. She wrote a sonnet, her first. Her family responded to it well, so – it sounds like almost on a whim – she sent the sonnet to a magazine, and they accepted it and actually paid her for it. Since then she is certainly making up for lost time. She’s won the Robert Penn Warren Prize, the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, the Robert Frost Award – and was runner-up for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

Her poems are thoughtful, intellectual, and questioning. I like them because she takes factual things (like the Meridian line in Greenwich) and uses it as a launching-off point for her own contemplations. Her thoughts are often unexpected. You are not sure where she will go. I love it because of the sense of all of the associations we have in life – especially those of us who are well-educated and well-read … It is hard not to see EVERYTHING as a metaphor if you have read classic literature, where everything has already been said. She comes from that perspective, and I really relate to it. Her poems are full of mythological creatures, and Biblical creatures, people from the Aeniad, from paintings, from myths and legends. Her sensibility is modern, but her references are from antiquity.

Here’s a poem of hers I love. I love it for her language, and the images it evokes, but I also love it because she describes perfectly a sensation I know intimately (I am sure we all do). I love it because she gives me another way to think about those sudden out-of-the-blue moments of transcendent happiness. I am not sure which version of the “annunciation” she was thinking of, but this one always comes to mind for me.

Annunciations, Nowadays

She didn’t expect to be entertaining an angel.
She didn’t think: I’ll wear the blue sateen
and sit and wait with some needlework or a book —

oh, and another thing; the furniture.
There wasn’t a polished prie-dieu, or credenza,
or inlaid table under a mullioned window —

and when it happens, it’s much the same with me.
I wish I could say I hear a rush of wings
or I have a little warning, but I don’t,

and it’s more than likely I’m, like her, in blue —
in weekday jeans, the habit of the morning,
hemmed around by desk and sink and stove.

That’s the way it is with so-called angels
nowadays. They still come unannounced,
to a shabby room. But they don’t deliver news.

There isn’t a message; just a visitation:
A sudden happiness — so unheralded,
so born from nothing, it’s not the stuff of daylight

or any logical agency. An though
I can’t exactly explain it as an angel,
it’s much the same, and I know it when it comes.