The blue estuaries: Poems, 1923-1968 (The American poetry series ; 11)

This short book contains every poem that Bogan wished preserved, This is less than 130 short lyrics, some of them only a single stanza, the longest only about 3 pages. Bogan's output seems to be inversely related to the intensity of her work. After reading one of these poems, its hard to imagine that they could have been written any other way. You get the sense that altering a single word would be disfiguring. Some are a bit obscure but definitely repay careful reading. Several poems have great power and many others contain striking language. Bogan deserves to be more widely read.

All her life, Louise Bogan exerted almost complete control over which of her poems were published and which were not. Her habit with each of her books, beginning with the Body of This Death (1923), was to exclude any previously published poems which no longer met her standards. Thus, Body of This Death included only one of five poems that had originally been published in the Chicago-based magazine Poetry just two years before. The following book, Dark Summer (1929), included poems Bogan wrote between 1923 and 1929, as well as several from Body of This Death -- but some poems were discarded. And so on: with each new volume, Bogan included poems which survived the winnowing of her rigorous eye, but discarded those with which, for whatever reason, she was no longer pleased. Bogan's final book, The Blue Estuaries, published a year before her death in 1970, collects in one volume all the poems she selected for her personal oeuvre. The theme of psychological frozenness seemed to have exerted an early fascination for Bogan. "Medusa," for example, is an exquisitely rendered depiction of horrific changelessness. The speaker has seen something terrible -- represented by the Medusa, with her "stiff bald eyes" -- that has becomes transfixed in memory. It is the scene the speaker witnesses, not the speaker herself, that becomes frozen as a result of the encounter with the Medusa. Nothing in process at the beginning of the scene will be fulfilled, nor will anything follow: "The water will always fall, and will not fall." By comparison, the lines in "The Sleeping Fury," a poem written several years later, are longer and looser than Bogan's usual controlled, formal lines, and they impose a structure fitting to the poem's content of freedom and redemption. The three Furies of Greek myth were responsible for punishing persons guilty of crimes that disturbed the social order -- murder (particularly of family members) or sexual crimes, for example. Here the speaker, whose crime we never learn, has tried to placate the enraged Fury with a burnt sacrifice; but while the sacrifice satisfies the society of which the speaker is a member, the Fury herself is unappeased. The speaker, whose repentance was half-hearted and false -- "The ignoble dream and the mask, sly, with slits at the eyes, / Pretence and half-sorrow, beneath which a coward's hope trembled." -- is still haunted by guilt and the Fury's scourges. It is only when the "scourged advances to meet" the Fury, turning back toward her to accept full punishment, that the Fury's rage come to an end and the speaker feel peace. This is a poem about guilt and expiation, self-confrontation and peace. It is also a poem about justice: "You, who give, unlike men, to expiation your mercy." "Men," says the speaker, will forgive even those who do not atone for their crimes -- but not the Fury, who is undeceived by the speaker's mask of "half-sorrow." Though hearkening back to different mythological beings a