Photographs by Becca Albee. Poems by Jan Bailey, Kate Cheney Chappell, Keller Cushing Freeman, Kristen Lindquist, Candice Stover
and Elizabeth Tibbetts
Cedar Mountain Books, Greenville, South Carolina
12 pp. $14.95
“Lost trees have righted themselves. Everyone is still alive.”
The poet George Oppen, who sailed among the islands of Penobscot Bay, once wrote, “There is no beauty in New England like the boats.” The Maine coast and its sailing traditions have always inspired poetry, from Longfellow to Samuel French Morse. This fine collection confirms this connection, presenting 11 poems by six contemporary poets, each one an intimate of islands.
Award-winning poet Jan Bailey, who makes her home on Monhegan, leads off with “Rite of Passage,” an account in five stanzas of a woman’s introduction to her husband’s family and their seaward orientation. Eating her first steamers, she swallows “it all”:
islands and channels, bays of seals, charts
with their hieroglyphic language, and the sea entering her life
like a ship heavy in the water, its course plotted dead ahead.
In her poem “Brimstone Island: One Day,” Kristen Lindquist evokes poet and fellow Camdenite Abbie Huston Evans (1881-1983), who was mesmerized by the manifestations of geologic time on the Maine coast. Evans would have admired the opening lines: “Deep within the indigo gullet of Penobscot Bay,/black rock was belched from earth’s belly.”
Candice Stover of Somesville also conjures eons in “Beach Walk Souvenir: Torrey Island.” The poet despairs at how stones, tumbled by “centuries/of salt,” fail to maintain their glimmer, “leaving us to question/what entices us, what lasts.”
Both of Elizabeth Tibbetts’s poems relate to family outings. “Birch Island” celebrates the special sensuality of swimming naked in the sea, while “Little Charms” looks back at a visit to Spruce Head and how in dreams everything reappears perfect: “Lost trees have righted themselves./Everyone is still alive.”
Not all the poems pertain to sailing. Poet and artist Kate Cheney Chappell’s “With Rachel at Her Refuge” channels the spirit of ecologist Rachel Carson while visiting the refuge that bears her name in Wells. Like Carson, Chappell responds with wonder to tidal life. The tides “fill each cup of cord grass to be a breeding place/for the krill and fry of the sea’s great swimmers.”
The collection ends with the title poem by Keller Cushing Freeman, a resident of Greenville, SC, with family roots in Maine. She lists the islands “moored in Casco Bay” as she comes to grips with a world foreign to someone “landlocked in an Appalachian childhood.” In the end, she finds herself “completely home” among the islands.
Each verse is matched up with a black-and-white photograph by Becca Albee, a native of Falmouth who is on the faculty of the City College of New York. In warm tones of gray, stretches of ledge and tide pools alternate with a few shipboard images. Printing on coated stock, Sailing Maine — its poems and photos — makes an ideal item for a Downeast cruise. q
Carl Little’s most recent book is Ocean Drinker: New & Selected Poems (Deerbrook Editions).