Headwaters, Ellen Bryant Voigt, 2013

A wonderful collection of poems by a Vermont poet evoking the state’s natural beauty, its wildlife and its rural people through lyrical and simple descriptions of her childhood and her marriage.  The complete absence of punctuation and capital letters was quite disorienting on first reading, but a second reading enabled me to feel quite comfortable since the rhythm of the lines provided the necessary feel of when to pause and when to break.  Also, the strange enjambment with sentences, unmarked by a capital letter or period, flowed from stanza to stanza in mid-sentence. All of those crafts of the poet work well, but it is the emotion and strength of the messages that is dominant, not the technique.  Lovely phrasing (“as each is subtracted into the houses” describes how children walking home from school gradually disappear into their homes in the poem Oak; ‘we are self-canceling’ in My Mother refers to her mother who raised one ‘good child’ and one not; ‘time is speeding up in a bad movie of my life months fly off/ the calendar or the camera stays fixed on one tree/ in leaf no leaves in leaf sunrise sunset/” is a wonderful description of aging in Birch).  Favorite poems include Oak about a school girl who plays her flute for an aging woman and Milkmaid which appears to be about a young girl and her father on a farm but which refers to Vermeer’s painting on a postcard.  Very lovely and moving work!