Letter to John Millett

Poetry Australia
Market Pl., Berrima, NSW 2577
Five Islands Press, PO Box U34
University of Wollongong, NSW 2500

Dear John Millett,

Thank you for sending me a review copy of your View from the Turret. I wish to apologise for not responding sooner, but I’ve been reeling from the death of my parents and uncle—all within the space of a year’s time. So at this point, I’m not sure how you got my name—perhaps through a journal I sometimes co-edit with Herman Berlandt, Mother Earth Journal? No matter.

We do have correspondence with a few Australian groups and are always searching for new contacts. (May we use a poem for our English language edition?

Please tell others about Mother Earth Journal; send poems to: c/o National Poetry Association, Fort Mason Center, Bldg. D, San Francisco, CA 94102

I don’t have the energy at this time to write and market book reviews but thank you for thinking of me. However, I will send your book on to a poet-friend in Amsterdam who is an avid WWII buff .

Reading your poems prompted me to send you some of my work that carried a similar theme. Please feel free to keep, print (or toss) them: no need to send them back. My Dutch friend has a curious notion of “inherited memories” of WWII; his family home was occupied before he was born but the stories he grew up with continue to haunt him—as they do me. 

I wasn’t born until 1952, after WWII, but I inherited the memories from my family, so to speak. The sentiments and fears of WWII escalated during the Cold War creating a link to the past. One uncle at Pearl Harbor, another in the Korean War. 

I remember Galway Kinnell telling me 10 years ago how he was haunted by an image, “A flash, a blinding flash.” He said that the poet’s job was to render/wrestle the ghosts of war into a poem. We were struggling with the concept Atomic Age, so the seeds of many of these poems harken back to that time. 

Hence this collection which is a bit uneven, but I included some poem I don’t send out—because they carry the thread of the story, however imperfectly. My “herons” for your herons. . .

You certainly evoke the telescoping of time in your first poem, Concorde Flight London to New York. War truly is a country farther away than anything else. 

I was near Laon, Picardy with my cousin last summer: turrets and berms from WWI still dominate the landscape. I like the way you use an admixture of images from the domestic, ordinary world amidst the impersonal statistics.

And the metaphors: Such innocence/ in the corridors of their bodies. . . A time older than clocks. . . coaxing summer from a wife’s body. . . sirens fisting through broken streets. . . elusive algebras of death. And the eerie image of the piano in the morning sun. . .against a black dialog of ash. 

The poems River at Night, Clough’s Wife, Bread & Granny—lovely. The granny can’t possibly be still alive? or do you not know when she died? Why the period after the title? I may use your Old Photograph in a writing assignment—I work as an artist in residence teaching poetry to children. If I get any stellar poems, I’ll send you a copy.

I hope your book has received adequate (and eloquent) review space, and that it’s selling well. Best of the holiday season to you.

Sincerely,
Maureen Hurley

Dec. 10, 1996