“A Kinship between Air and Awareness”: Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’sHello, the Roses
Robert Baker
ISLE Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment October 19, 2018 DOI: 10.1093/isle/isy077 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Commentary Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Key points | Argues that Berssenbrugge's poetry is shaped by the light and space of northern New Mexico and centers on relationships and their settings, combining a subdued tone with deep feeling and abstraction that demands sustained "negative capability" from readers. |
Abstract
A reader of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s poetry is likely to be touched first of all by its beauty. It’s as though the light and space of northern New Mexico, where she has lived for decades, entered her poems as an air of meditation, a horizon-wide scale putting everything in perspective. There’s a kinship, she says at one point, “between air and awareness” (Hello 80). The concerns of her most widely read work, from Empathy through Nest, are things we are always trying to put in perspective. She is a poet of relationships (with spouses, mothers, daughters, sisters, friends, strangers, animals), the spaces in which relationships take place, the clearings and darkenings of relationships, the art of “feeling [one’s] way through the fog” that the life of relationship involves (Empathy 43). She is a poet of intuition, or empathy, to recall the title of one of her most challenging books. While her work is characterized by a remarkably subdued tone, its depth of feeling and lyrical attention are everywhere present. At the same time it’s highly abstract. It requires sustained negative capability.