Margaret Newlin: Collected Poems

My life continues to be challenging, but though I’m not writing much, I find that reading and talking about other people’s poems is a solace.

Today I picked up Margaret Newlin’s Collected Poems, 1963-1985 (Ardis, Ann Arbor, 1986) , a book lent to me by a friend (and overdue to be returned.) When I googled Newlin, I learned that her earlier collected poems, The Snow Falls Upward, was a 1977 finalist for the National Book Award. Today, she is all but forgotten, with no presence at either the Academy of American Poets or Poetry Foundation. I wanted to do a blog post, just to put her name out there one more time.

Besides notices of The Snow Falls Upward, I found little more on-line than an obituary notice in a publication from Chester County, Pennsylvania. She was born in 1925, married Nicholas Newlin in 1956, taught English Literature at Washington College in Chestertown, MD, and had four sons. She died in 2005. Her poem, “Rain,” was included in Art and Love: an Illustrated Anthology of Love Poetry (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1990).

I knew I wouldn’t have time to read the entire Collected so I decided, somewhat perversely, to read the longest section, “The Book of Mourning,” poems written after her husband’s death in 1976. Here’s one poem, where the poignancy is underscored by the hopeful continuing of life and love story at the end:

Two

It was to have been
The two of us
Stretching our hands to the fire
On winter nights like this,
The flakes crowding the windowpane
Like newborn souls.

We would sip whiskey or wine,
Thinking of our boys,
Each on a far-off whitened campus,
Missing them hugely of course,
Yet heady with ourselves once more alone.

Who knows? Inventive as a bride
I might have outdone myself with meals,
And then we’d talk or write or read.
A walk with the dogs through printless snow, perhaps,
Before we watched the blaze
Die down, your arm, in its tweed,
Hugging me close.
A cup of something hot….
Then bed.

Miles off, this blizzard night,
Our oldest son,
Wearing your English coat,
May even now be walking home
His sweet small girl,
His arm — your arm, my arm
Too — around her,
Holding her tight.

— Margaret Newlin