Lee Sharkey

LEE SHARKEY READS FROM ‘A DARKER, SWEETER STRING,’ Vox Audio, Magdalena, N.M., 2008; CD, $7.

To my knowledge, there is no scholarly analysis that provides generally agreed-upon categories of post-1960s American poetry. But at least two prominent thematic strands might be suggested: the personal self, and issues of political and social justice outside the self.

It might also be noticed that a lot of poems in those two categories are written by women. Men too, no doubt, but there is at least one tacitly agreed-upon category, “women’s poetry.” Famous examples come to mind, such as Adrienne Rich, who fine-tuned the poetry of personal anger, and Denise Levertov, who made strong marks in the 1960s as an anti-war poet. At points the personal and the political intersect. There has over the years been a lot of personal anger to be expressed about world events, and Levertov (who summered in Maine until her death in 1997) and Rich made some of the most adroit of those expressions.

Lee Sharkey of Vienna has labored in that poetic milieu since the 1970s. The new Vox Audio CD of her reading provides a sampling of where the trip has led. The 20 poems she reads here are from “A Darker, Sweeter String” (Off the Grid, 2008), and not to put too fine a point on it, but there is more darker than sweeter.

In fact the main theme is pain. There are barbed wire, thirst, hunger, cigarette-burn torture, alienation, fear, agonized pity, and “fine-grained poison that sifted from the ceiling.” “I want to be buried alive” one of the narrators states. It’s scary. The mindscape of most of these selections seems directly out of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalypse novel, “The Road.” “War has become the landscape of my imagination,” another narrator says, apparently with regret. The sun does break sweetly through at odd moments, but the Holocaust is chronically nearby.

These expressions of personal pain are responses to the horrors and injustices of war — in Palestine, Israel, Iraq, the United States as it has linked itself to Iraq — and of the tortured everyday lives that are shielded by distance from bullets and rocket-propelled grenades but nonetheless in deep conflict. The horrors that men inflict on women, one of the cherished themes in this milieu, are also present.

You can hear in these recordings a great carefulness about the choices of words, which Lee Sharkey has always stressed, and the poems have a feeling of plaintive, methodical determination, a determination to see it through no matter what. That is to be admired from a purely personal point of view, in the same way the weekly Women in Black peace vigil kept by Sharkey and others in Farmington is to be admired for its pure moral tenacity. Readers who feel personally outraged by the world, and are willing to confront the insides of that outrage, will find companionship here.

Lee Sharkey is a retired assistant professor from the University of Maine at Farmington. Copies of the CD are available through http://theshop.free-jazz.net/vox-audio/shop/audio-poetry. Dana Wilde may be contacted at poetry@bangordailynews.net.