Briefly Noted    

Faculty Et Al    

Alumni/ae     

1936–Alfred D. Chandler Jr. Inventing the Electronic Century: The Epic Story of the Consumer Electronics and Computer Industries..(The Free Press, 2001)

1943–Gore Vidal. Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated. (Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2002)

1947–Glenn D. Paige. Nonkilling Global Political Science. (Xlibris Corp., 2002)

1956–William Bayer. Dream of the Broken Horses. (Pocket Books, 2002)

1957–Peter Benchley. Trouble: True Stories and Lessons About the Sea.(Random House, 2002)

1970–Noel T. Boaz, M.D.Evolving Health: The Origins of Illness and How the Modern World Is Making Us Sick. (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2002)

1972–Thomas G. Osenton. Customer Share Marketing: How the World's Great Marketers Unlock Profits From Customer Loyalty. (Financial Times/Prentice Hall, 2002)

1974–James P. Steyer. The Other Parent: The Inside Story of the Media's Effect on Our Children. (Atria Books, 2002)

1980–James Meyer. Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties. (Yale University Press, 2001)

1991–James and Sean Mahoney. The Mahoneys [CD] (Tyrol Records Inc., 2002)

1993–John Forte. I, John [CD](Transparent Music, 2002)

Briefly Noted     

1944–George Plimpton. [preface of] Milking the Moon: A Southerner's Story of Life on This Planet, by Eugene Walter as told to Katherine Clark.(Crown Publishers, 2001)

1947–Jeffrey O'Connell and Patrick B. Bryan. "More Hippocrates, Less Hypocrisy: 'Early Offers' as a Means of Implementing the Institute of Medicine's Recommendations on Malpractice Law." IN Journal of Law and Health (v. 15, issue 1, 2000-01)

1947–Jeffrey O'Connell and Andrew S. Boutros. "Treating Medical Malpractice Claims Under a Variant of the Business Judgment Rule" IN Notre Dame Law Review (v. 77, issue 2, February 2002)

1953–Muller Davis. "Is the Genie out of the Bottle?" IN Marriage, Health and the Professions: If Marriage Is Good for You What Does This Mean for Law, Medicine, Ministry, Therapy and Business? Edited by John Wall et al. (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2002)

1956–Walter R. Niessen. Combustion and Incineration Processes. [3rd ed., revised and expanded] (Marcel Dekker, 2002)

1968–James L. Hale. "The Blasphemy of Saint Augustine." IN Philosophy Now. (Issue 35, March/April, 2002)

1972–Juliet P. Kostritsky. "When Should Contract Law Supply a Liability Rule or Term?: Framing a Principle of Unification for Contracts." IN Arizona State Law Journal. (v. 32, no. 4, Winter 2000)

1996–Rebecca Engle. "General Test-Taking Strategies" [chapter 2] and "General Chemistry" [chapter 5] IN MCAT 45: Advanced Prep for Advanced Students. (Simon & Schuster, 2002)

Three acclaimed poets-one the Academy's first emerita and two of them alumni-have, in their most recent books, each engaged with some aspect of grief. Dolores Kendrick-now the poet laureate of Washington, D.C., but from 1972 until 1993 a distinguished member of the Academy's English department-immerses the reader in a street woman's richly tragic life in Why the Woman is Singing on the Corner. In The Painted Bed, Donald Hall '47 progresses through the mourning he began in Without, his 1998 collection of poems written following the death of his wife. In Heroin, Charlie Smith '65 casts back with a different perspective on a distant but dogged history of addiction and loss. These are sympathetic works all, moving both as stories of our age and for the voices of our peers.

Why the Woman is Singing on the Corner

A tremendous pathos colors the text of Why the Woman is Singing on the Corner (Peter E. Randall Publisher, 2001), the fourth and latest book by poet Dolores Kendrick, the Academy's Vira I. Heinz Professor Emerita. In her "verse narrative," she creates an intricately layered portrait of Phelia, a 48-year-old African-American woman driven by a lifetime's loss to become the faceless, mad street person-or is it street prophet?-of the title. Contemporary and close in its perspective, more narrative than her most recent (and justly praised) book The Women of Plums: Poems in the Voices of Slave Women, Singing on the Corner envelops readers at once into Phelia's life and delirium.

It can be a terrifying ride through her half-ecstatic perspective, spiraling in time through a life that has known a mother's abandonment, the death of a daughter, the loss of three husbands and now a boyfriend. Like Shakespeare's character, this Ophelia is driven mad by the cruelties of love's loss. Violently alone, she tries to invoke more permanent family. From the beginning, for example, she dialogues with the "meddling" ghost of her sister, Garrah. Much later, still alone, she buries some of Garrah's ashes in her garden. Reminiscent of Hamlet's Ophelia, who distributed the flowers of her memories to the court, Kendrick's Phelia "would sit for long hours and eat her garden / in separate flowers, one by one, and she would feel her / madness coming on like a thunderstorm meddling its / way through the smallest bud, or the tenderest root."

Singing on the Corner is populated with Phelia's ghosts, both the bidden and the banished. Phantom dialogue, song and scripture dash through the verse like flocks of birds-all signatures of Kendrick's evocative style. So, too, is Phelia's search for a patron spirit in Jo, a slave ancestor who "Kept the hell of her life in her apron pocket and dared it to burn or touch her flesh." She forgets her boyfriend has left her, personifies the street and trees, bows to the crowds who gather to stare and, ultimately, seeks out the God who will not leave her and is baptized: "So chosen, she is no longer left alone." By the end the reader may feel invoked as well, an intimate witness to Phelia's song and to the kind of life we commonly brush by.

The Painted Bed

The Painted Bed (Houghton Mifflin, 2002) is Donald Hall's second book to grapple with the loss of his wife, poet Jane Kenyon, who died of leukemia in 1995. But don't expect another without, his previous collection, which documented that loss almost as it happened, its poems journalistic, epistolary, raw. This new collection, his 14th book of poetry, moves in elegiac floods and drips through a highly structured procession of grief. Even at the lowest points, Hall's poems ring with a deep-seated vitality and fortitude-an ardor, present throughout-that speak to a determination to weather the way from one side of mourning to another.

While Hall never presumes happy endings, or even complete recovery, The Painted Bed takes the reader forward and far. Part I's first poem launches with "When she died it was as if his car accelerated / off the pier's end and zoomed upward over death water / for a year without gaining or losing altitude"-an expansive piece anatomizing a future of grief, just as grief sizes him up in turn. This sends us onward, out of the desolation of "Throwing the Things Away" into the luscious tracts of reminiscence on a bountiful life in "Daylilies on the Hill 1975-1989," and finally into Part IV: "Ardor," the collection's buoyant final movement, and sobering coda.

As in much of Hall's previous work, the poems here are chronological, specific and frank; well-crafted to contain the leap and plunge of each consecutive step away from a beloved's death. Unlike the freer flow of Without, The Painted Bed heavily recruits poetry's formal constraints of meter and rhyme to take control of the emotional course. In "The Wish," he writes,

I keep her weary ghost inside me.
"Oh, let me go," I hear her crying.
"Deep in your dark you want to hide me
And so perpetuate my dying.
I can't undo
The grief that you
Weep by the stone where I am lying.
Oh, let me go."

With such gentle self-consciousness, The Painted Bed invites the reader into what might otherwise be too personal to join. In "Kill the Day," Hall writes of a "loneliness that could not endure a visitor," but his use of the third person here and in subsequent moments of broken form (as in "Distressed Haiku") as well as his softly self-deprecatory comments let us know this ban does not include the reader.

These poems implicitly acknowledge the futility of commanding grief to make a full and orderly accounting of itself. From "The After Life":

He saw the clock at death's hour
and fell into tears. Wiping
his eyes he noted
that he mistook the time
and in sixty minutes
would need to howl again.

What resonates so potsently here and throughout The Painted Bed is the common humanity of that attempt.

Heroin

There is a subtle urgency to Heroin (W.W. Norton, 2000), Charlie Smith's fifth book of poems, which strives again and again to bear witness to a history that cannot endure direct scrutiny. Smith does not take us into the primary throes of heroin addiction, a mother's mental illness or lost loves; this book's moment of reckoning picks up well after those days. Instead, there's a quality of troubled reverie here, an unromanticized sense of peace that pervades the careful sifting through of relics, proxies and foils that make those darker times legible.

The immediacy of this otherwise reflective book comes in a tempered sense of beauty, one grown and braced against aggregates of old ugliness and grief. The bitter awe of that vision comes out in "Beautyworks," for example, with "old bomb holes grown up in snakes and yellow flowers / a lobbyist weeping over his father's cancer . . . beauty's like this, / a lingerer at parties, last to get the taste of love out of its mouth." And these poems depend on that same kind of synergy. The images throughout Heroin are often telegraphic, tumbling from one to another like the act of memory itself. This is no escalating digression, though, but an oblique, earnest effort to extract an ineffable wisdom which exceeds the associated artifacts of years gone by.

Though explicit voices speak from the past, there are, conspicuously, no direct dialogues, virtually no direct interactions between two people. After a breakup, it is with a woman's possessions that he engages, and the furniture and plants that deride him. Later, he scours texts, abandoned board games or photographs for what a relationship truly meant. The closest Smith comes to open accusation is with his dog, who, in "Of This I Speak to No One," "stands on their front porch, looking impassively at me / like a friend who believes the baseless charges."

His writing conveys a palpable dread of examining too closely what he deeply needs to understand: "Later, as neon translates the early / works of the dark / a man remembers a clue to life / can't state it and stands baffled." This is from his "Poems without Words," a title that seems exactly right. There's a particular satisfaction in the medium, too, for poetry may be the most nimble and exacting form for Smith's endeavor. What succeeds so well in Heroin is the wonderful juxtaposition between the subject's insistence that he is at a loss for the right words and the eloquent rush and flow of images at work in each poem.

Anne E. Campisi, the 2001-2002 Bennett Fellow is currently at work on a novel entitled The Lime Tree. She now lives in Ithaca, NY.