In her new book Homelight, Lola Haskins embraces the notion of literature as an ongoing conversation between the past and the future which takes place in the present. In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot argues that poets need to obtain, “by great labour,” the historical sense, which he defines as “a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his [sic] own county has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order,” and that it is this historical sense that “makes a writer most acutely conscious of his [sic] place in time, of his [sic] own contemporaneity.” Haskins’ Homelight opens with a section titled “On the Shoulders of Giants,” which is comprised of poems honoring both western and eastern influences, from Sappho to Blake to Rilke to Zbigiew Herbert to Merwin and Mary Oliver.

The poems in this section honor, reflect on, and take in new directions both the obsessions and the forms of those “giants.” For example, in the first poem in the book, “Why Anais Nin Would Lie with Me,” which is “after” Sappho, the crystalline precision of the brief poem is clearly a nod to the fact that what we have of Sappho’s body of work is in fragments: 

More than the shells on the beach
I desire
the shells in the mountains.

The shells on the beach break
easily.
The shells in the mountains

are ancient seas, turned bone.
I wake,
craving them with my tongue.

Consider the opening tercet. Regardless of the “More” which opens the sentence, the form allows the desire to pertain to both the shells on the beach and the shells in the mountains, as desire being on a separate line allows “I desire” to pertain equally to both shells. Only that initial “More” provides the valuation the poem enacts. And in the second tercet, the lineation allows the initial sentence to say both that the shells on the beach are fragile and that, despite their fragility, they would easily break the shells in the mountains. This duality of meaning that’s possible through a precision of poetic craft connects Haskins’ art to the remnants of Sappho’s art and allows the complexity of experience to be fully linguistically explored, which is one of the pleasures of good poetry. And the close of this tight, condensed poem, that “craving them with my tongue,” also links the shells in the mountains, which the poem acknowledges “are ancient seas,” with those on the beach through the idea of salt, which is mentioned without being mentioned. Another nod to Sappho’s art.

In “Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,” a poem that offers nods to William Blake and John Clare, Haskins writes: “After the rain, frogs appear who were never there before./Then, as all that surrounds us is miracle, like miracles, they sing.” And Lola Haskins’ poems, like those miraculous frogs, do sing. As she writes in “His Poems,” a poem with a nod to Zbigiew Herbert, her poems, with “the smallest contact,” “explode.” And in these controlled explosions of language, Haskins speaks of “the stars that every night / are closer to gone.” Throughout Homelight, she speaks with passion of other gifts of nature which, due to our thoughtlessness, are “closer to gone,” like the cranes and goldfinches and doves and other birds we witness in poems whose words surprise us and often delight us.

This is something Lola Haskins’ poetry shares with the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Both poets share a linguistic precision and are interested in the idiomatic use of the American dialect. Also, both Haskins and Dickinson’s poetry contain a longing to enter—utterly—nature, to be immersed in it, to speak out of that immersion as if allowing the natural world itself to do the saying. As Haskins writes in “Seeds: A Sequence,” “Inside our bodies is a seed and inside/the seed is our body again.” And it is this seed, which is our seed and the seed of all that we are and all that surrounds us, which can be said to illustrate our true relationship to that which we refer to as nature, as if nature could be something separate from us, something other. Haskins’ image of the seed in these lines makes it clear that we have never not been and could never not be a part of the natural world. That we are engaged in a constant dance with whatever we may at times think of as “other.”

And  Haskins is a poet who understands the dance that syntax and line perform together in the well-formed poem. In “At the Park,” for instance, a poem that opens with the wonderful description of “The oaks overhead” that “tremble with robins,” has the lines “there’s so much to see they can’t stop / looking.” The marvelous thing about verse is that a poem asks (demands) to be read both syntactically and linearly. So first we have those robins continuing to “flit and land” because there is so much to see, and only when the sentence is completed on the following line does the stopping apply directly to the looking. And the last two lines of this small but expressive poem give us another fine example of the tension that comes of reading both in terms of syntax and in terms of the line as a unit of meaning: “we call to each other like children swinging/lanterns, stars among the darkened trees.” So first it is the children who are swinging—as in swinging through the trees in play, as children are wont to do—and then it is the children who are swinging the lanterns. And finally it is the stars shining down through the darkening trees that are the lanterns. This is the dexterity of poetry. In well-crafted verse, the density of meaning is, or can be, enhanced by a precise use of the line as an additional unit of meaning. It’s a bit like the theory behind cubism, that of trying to see various angles of vision all at once. 

The poems in Lola Haskins’ Homelight “sing / like the thin edge / of the moon,” entrancing us with not only their music but their stories and their wisdom. Their “voices” teach us “song” and their “swayings   dance,” as “The Hundred and One Names of the Wind” puts it. The light of home, in Haskins’ poems, is primarily the various lights of the natural world, light which is so much more welcoming and healthy than what we tend to fill our lives with. This collection in various ways reminds us to cherish the light of the natural world, to experience it fully, to embrace it and all it offers, and to feel at home in it. To remember how it can feel to notice how, as “The Salt Marsh” puts it,

At dusk the water turns melted pearl
and the grasses glow like the lights of houses
or as if they have just fallen in love.

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