Dawn Potter

The publication of Dawn Potter's first book, Boy Land, signals the arrival of a substantial and original American poet. Dawn Potter's work is characterized by great feeling for the American language, for poetic traditions and for the down home world of rural Maine in which she dwells. One is never sure in a given poem what elements will preponderate and how they will interact with one another. That uncertainty is both bracing and exhilarating as she weaves what might seem to be discordant elements to forge truly engaging poems. Although she is a very shrewd social observer, she is foremost a poet of genuine invention (as in "Rumpelstiltskin's Garden"). We go to poetry for imagination and she is an imaginer. 
Baron Wormser

Eclogue

All the long day, rain
pours quicksilver
down the blurred glass,
gardens succumb to forest,

half-ripe tomatoes cling
hopelessly to yellow vines,
cabbages crumple and split,
but who cares?

Let summer vanish,
let the tired year
shrink to the width
of a cow path,

soppy hens straggle
in their narrow yard,
and every last leaf
on the maples redden,

shrivel, and die.
Nothing needs me,
today, but you,
sweet hand,

cupping the bones
of my skull.  Alas,
poor Yorick, picked
clean as an egg.

How rich we grow,
bright sinew and blood,
my eyes open, yours
blue.

*  *  * 

Eclogue

Play "Sister Morphine" four or five times an hour,
sleet jittering the window, and what is it about that song

yanking the chain so tight I have to cover my eyes
before walls collapse?  A lover can set bounds to love,

but then, is it still love, or some kinder emotion?
Trollope's married ladies esteem their ample lords;

but look at crazy Bradley Headstone, he doesn't
esteem Lizzie one bit, though he loves her

like a man from hell.
The novels say I'm reaching the prime of life

when I ought to forget about skin by firelight,
but I've always been a sucker for desire, I can't stop now

just because my friends have marriageable daughters.
Girls these days, they don't grow up watching Virginia

Woolf stir the soup, Juliet behind the barn dying for love.
What girl wants to be Virginia-thinking-of-Juliet anymore?

You're stuck with me, dear boy, pockets full of rocks,
though at least the river's frozen, no drownings till spring,

you'll have to give up the ghost and let me love you,
it's the best I can do, this dark age.

*  *  * 

Rumpelstiltskin's Garden

Rain, and more rain! And now
this whore sunshine!
Grass, how dare you inflict yourself

on my desires, you and your weed-
sprung clan, shattering the peonies,
raping the barren hops.

Filthy mess of life!
You thrive for spite,
like the princeling who squalls in the muddy

shadows, like the miller's queen
shedding ice in my heart's parlor.
Fury! Fury!

I could tear myself in two,
sever like stove wood under the axe,
then split again a thousand times,

pound myself to ash
till all the busy ants in Christendom
couldn't sort my rage from dust.

Dawn Potter is the author of Boy Land & Other Poems (Deerbrook Editions, 2004). New work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Connecticut Review, the Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. In 2004 she received a grant from the Maine Arts Commission for study in Rome, and she teaches poetry and music in the public schools.