At the Edge of Actuality and Imagination: Gail Moran Slater's Poetry

 

At the Edge of Actuality and Imagination: Gail Moran Slater’s Poetry

By Carl Blumenthal

 

On the cover of Gail Moran Slater’s new book of poetry, At the Edge (Antrim House, www.antrimhousebooks.com, paperback, $15.00, also available from Amazon) is the oil painting, “Automat,” one of Edward Hopper’s masterpieces depicting the loneliness and alienation of early modern urban life.

 

Against the inky backdrop of night as viewed through the diner’s window are the bright, shiny surfaces of the automated diner and a colorfully dressed white woman, in winter coat and hat, seated at a lone table with a coffee cup in her right hand. Most striking is that while the hand cradling the cup is bare, her other hand is gloved. In other words, the automat is a temporary way station on a solitary and perhaps gloomy walk, from where and to where we can only speculate.

 

Given Hopper painted “Automat” in 1927, at the height of the pre-crash, roaring 20s, the woman’s stylish hat and fur-trimmed coat suggest she is more likely an upper-class “flapper” than a lower-class “street walker.” Hopper often used his wife, artist Josephine Nivison, as a model, and, because he claimed that his work wasn’t consciously about loneliness, it’s possible this character is taking a break from some creative endeavor or contemplating her next move, if she is not experiencing artistic block.

 

That’s why I imagine Gail Moran Slater identifies with the “automaton” in the painting for whom this diner might be a regular haunt. The woman might wish to purchase a ready-made poem from one of the vending machines with a variety of food (for thought), but with her eyes downcast and apparently in deep thought, she may realize that creativity (after all, she is the central subject of a painting) is no easy task.

 

Yet, the automat may be more than just a lonely ship of dreams where one can pass the night but actually a refuge, like poetry is from an otherwise prosaic reality. Although the title of the book is taken from one line, “at the edge of tears,” Moran’s poems suggest the poet is on the verge of numerous revelations or epiphanies that tend to the ineffable. Her goal is to lead readers to the proverbial water’s edge—there are several references to the shore—with such tantalizing imagery that we will plunge deeply into the flotsam and jetsam of our own lives.

 

Moran references other paintings: Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl,” in her poem, “On the Steps of the Met 1997,” Homer’s marine paintings, such as “Blue Boat,” and also “Boys in a Pasture,” in “Winslow Homer Exhibition,” and Rembrandt’s late self-portraits, in “After Viewing the Dutch Masters.”

 

Though these paintings are as different from each other as they are from “Automat,” each poem is representative, in order, of one of the three sections of the book. In keeping with the spatial imagery of “At the Edge,” I would summarize them as 1. Near and dear; 2. Far and away; and 3. Home bound. This structure amounts to a satisfying thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.  

 

“The Edge of Tears” is the last poem in the collection, and, like “They are Present by their Absence,” also from the third section, has this double-edged take on love and loss: “Come with me to the edge of tears/ where candles gutter but stay lit./ My head is bursting with flowers.”

 

At the Edge contains only 25 poems but each one paints a well-crafted picture, dare I say, of events described in the poet’s voice or those dear to her who she quotes or paraphrases. Thus, it’s not surprising that in her epigraph Moran quotes W.B. Yeats’ “The Lake Isle of Innisfree:” “I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore/…I hear it in the deep heart’s core.” What she promises us, if, like her, we are brave enough to face our possibilities as well as our limitations, is “one true moment of clarity” between the light and darkness of our lives (from “After Viewing the Dutch Masters”).   

 

In a similar vein, “Consolation” is the first poem in section one, about a tree laden with fruit that someone brought back from Hawaii and left on her porch. The kinetic nature of the tree as it blows in a breeze is transformed through vibrant simile and metaphor into the personality of this bearer of good tidings: “The light between the leaves was you,/ restless with intelligence,/ quick    wild/ stirring my heart at the borders (my emphasis) of my splintered world.” Here again is a contrast between love and loss, wholeness and division. Some of the other cutting edges are estrangement, reconciliation, breakup, madness, death, war, peace, laughter, and remembrance.

 

Her simplest and most riveting poem, “Crossing the Distance,” comes at the end of the first section:

 

My sister takes in dogs of all shapes and sizes

        but she does not take in me.

 

I call to her but no sound I make

is made of words that can cross the distance between  us.

 

Last night she was just a cutout on a hill,

a pack of curs at her heels, the sky burning,

and I knew she did not belong to me.

 

Given that Moran has nothing but good feelings for and memories of the rest of her   immediate family, including her ex-husband, the edge she stands on here looms over a gorge of emotion. Even her way with words cannot bridge it. 

 

Another little gem is “This Time of Night,” in the middle of the third section:

 

Under the white coverlet, now as then,

the sweeping tide of the sheets,

the same cool turning, I dive, I tumble

      toward dreams.

Memories run wild. Night must have

released all its prisoners—

my ghosts are younger now.

 

I love this time of night. My bed makes me

alert to everything—the hours,

the planes in flight, the faucet drip.

My senses gleam like candles.

 

How she can be at the edge of sleep and yet, acutely conscious is a paradox like many others in the book. For instance, the rules of her dad and his chums’ card-playing were incomprehensible to her as a child, but she’s sure in retrospect that “The Angel Gabriel/ could have dropped in/ and blown his trumpet;/ the Second Coming/ could have come and gone./ They wouldn’t have heard a thing.” (from “in memory of APM”)

 

I have not referenced poem’s from the book’s second section, the shortest, because, with the exception of her homage to W.B. Yeats, “A Kind of Madness,” based on a sojourn in Ireland, they tug at my heart the least. Many of her farthest trips were for writing workshops. However enlightening, perhaps she preferred to be home at her writing desk, as in “Consolation.”   

 

A former teacher of English who now instructs immigrants in ESL, Gail Moran Slater grew up in Boston and lives in Hingham on the South Shore, “a place mad for poetry.” The three favorite poems she memorized are Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle into the Good Night,” “One Art,” by Elizabeth Bishop, and Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking.”

Read these poems and you’ll understand why Slater loves to live on the cutting edge between actuality and imagination.  

 

(Formerly a community organizer and urban planner, Carl Blumenthal is now a mental health peer counselor and journalist. He used to live in Boston and the North Shore of Massachusetts. Carl writes for Behavioral Health News, City Voices, a peer mental health journal, Friends (Quaker) Journal, and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle as well as his own www.brooklynsgotculture.blogspot.com.)