Gregerson captivates crowd

Oberlin alumna Linda Gregerson is a poet's poet. A college graduate from the class of 1971, Gregerson possesses the rare ability to sinuously blend the intellectual and rarefied with the spiritual and pious. She creates verse that, as Professor of Creative Writing Martha Collins stated in her introduction to Gregerson's reading on Thursday, "is not content to stay in the place it began."

Gregerson's poetry is brainy stuff. It is informed with the early ideas with which she surrounds herself while teaching Renaissance literature at the University of Michigan. Her verse deals with questions of the body, of the natural world, and of human mortality in ways that resonate on a reverential level. Though intellectually challenging, Gregerson never loses sight of her job as a poet: namely, to document the complexities of a life worth living.

Gregerson is an actress as well as a writer. Her grounded presence and trained voice made her a joy to hear. Even while humbly apologizing for a sore throat, she filled the lecture hall with a commanding, musical sound. Poetry is an art to be spoken; Gregerson delivered her verse as only an actress could.

The reading opened with "Good News," a piece taken from 1996's The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep. In it, Gregerson writes about "God's god / forsaken children." The poem touches on images of resurrection: "the cancerous / cat comes purring back to health" as well as of belief: "Most Englishmen, / the Archbishop said smoothly, are still residual Christians. / We still need a clergy for funerals."

She continued to explore the theme of resurrection in another poem, "Resurrection of the Body." A piece with a decidedly biblical and medieval title, the subject of the poem is a mother whose child suffers from a brain injury. The resurrection in the poem is that from sickness to health: "The mother would give her soul to see / this child lift her head on her own." Gregerson describes the child with soft language. "Her face / translucent, beautiful, / as if a cheekbone might directly render / a tranquil / heart."

In "For the Taking," Gregerson addressed the issue of incest with deep sensitivity and melancholy. She writes how a family is "deaf and blind" to the violation of a little girl by an uncle. Incorporating a distanced tone, Gregerson writes that "we / who could have saved her, who knew / what it was in the best of times / to cross / the bridge of shame." It is haunting lines like this one that makes Gregerson's poetry so compelling.

The evening concluded with three new works that have yet to be published. The first, written while in Scotland, is the highly naturalistic "Petrarchan." A sort of ode to the great Italian sonnet writer Petrarch, Gregerson commented that the poem "is about wanting what you cannot have. This idea is the engine with which all poetry since Petrarch has been propelled by." A dreamy, misty-feeling piece, especially memorable is the image of a new baby "turning to look at the look of the new again world."

True to her roots as an actress, Gregerson next read a piece she was inspired to write after seeing a particularly fine Welsh actor perform in A Midsummer's Night Dream. The poem draws heavily on imagery from Shakespeare's play and especially on the play-within-a-play of Pyramus and Thisbe.

The final poem again circled back to Gregerson's primary interest in medieval literature. Entitled "Noah's Wife," it uses as its base the character from the early medieval mystery plays. In it there is a nice line about a "world so new that death till this minute wasn't required."

On the cover of The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep is a telling image that captures Gregerson's work nicely. It is a fifteenth-century painting of a glassy-eyed woman lost in thought. Through her poems and eloquent delivery, there is no doubt that Gregerson is a thinker. She is a writer who expertly meshes the intellectual with the curious in an illuminating and reflective way.