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Poem Of The Week: Pastoral By Ali Lewis

Pastoral

Three weeks alone and all I can read
are these backwoods American poets
with their figs and windfall peaches
and their one good chair of four legs
from which they observe

the changing yaw of the up-early light
as it climbs and then brims the horse trough,
or the rich patterning on an earthenware
jug filled with slow syrup their father tapped
himself and sealed, his old
clay fingerprints held still on its lip -

and attend to what such heirlooms
might want to teach us, if we can learn to listen
so hard we hear their thoughts as our own.

Ali Lewis’ gorgeously upholstered sonnet, if a sonnet it is, is one element in a continuum of contemplative poems that are distinguished by a kind of stylistic contiguity. For Lewis’ collection, Absence, whose formal diversity does not obscure a predilection for the gentle rhythms of discursive argument, is an embodiment of well-wrought good sense, an attempt at negotiating an intelligent passage through the hinterland of human abstraction.

In ‘Pastoral’ the abstraction is founded in isolation, where the seemingly unwonted intrusion of the voices of the American ‘backwoods’ idyll – Whitman and Thoreau perhaps – breaks into the silent void before precipitating a deeply ironic and mimetic transcription of an austere rural landscape’s signifiers. Lewis’ reading is rhythmically measured, an artful and persuasive rendering of a nineteenth century country cabin drawn entirely from imagination.

Lewis’ final tercet amounts, almost, to an affirmation of Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’ theory, as it absorbs the poem’s beautifully modulated inventory of detail, to yield a paean to continuity and valued inheritance. For the poet’s ‘pastiche’ is an act not of denial, but rather of love and acceptance.

‘Pastoral’ is taken from Absence, published by Cheerio (2024)

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