The Loneliness of the Poet/Housewife
by Mary Humphrey Baldridge
Fiddlehead Poetry book No.244, 1978
Mary Humphrey Baldridge, born 1937, is a Calgarian, playwright and poet. This is her first collection of poetry. Titled The Loneliness of the Poet/Housewife, it is just that. A chronicle of a lonely poet/housewife. This collection is no celebration of life. It tends, instead, darkly, to illumine endings - the endings of all things. There is sad memory here, and there is the uncaring present and there is the dim future - and overall, is the spectre of finality. Finality expressed in the poet's vision of the hunter, the hunted.
Trees, cats and victims occur time and again in this collection, as symbols. The trees, one would assume metaphorically, as life or perhaps, the cycle of renewal; life and death. Trees seen in summer-thriving and trees dressed in winter shrouds. And the cats; predators, slinking through the back-alleys of this poet's perception, forever hunting their helpless victims; hunting, devouring.
This is a very internal view of life, almost completely without joy, without happy discovery, devoid of anticipation of the future.
There is not any comfort in marriage here, as in 'Space', where: "now we are two great marble boulders/ striking against each other continuously/ until permanently s h a t t e r e d". Well, sad, is it not? Impervious to one another's needs, two psyches lie together in the conjugal bed and hold themselves apart: "at night I lie quiet aware of my round hardness/ terrified of rolling toward the center/ of the bed".
In her life as a 'poet/housewife', Ms. Baldridge seems always to be looking out-of-doors, through windows, at the trees, the birds, the cats continually on the prowl; a relentless recurrence, this vision of oneself inside, looking out on the pressing scene. The passing scene, however, is an ever-static one; life pursued by death. But was she different before marriage, before becoming the 'poet/housewife'? It would seem not, for, as she notes in "The Solitary Tree": "I was in college then/ Drinking black coffee as I sat by that/ cold window/ And I thought: what greater pleasure/ Than to sit, talking, thinking, drinking coffee/ Gazing out at snow in turmoil and the solitary sparkling tree?".
Why has what was once a pleasure become a personal kind of torture? The answer evades the reader. But the scenes which once gave pleasure now threaten, as in the poem, "As They Await Their Hour": "The trees/ have all/ advanced a pace/ black hands trembling/ their feet in knotted trails/ above the earth/ their eyes yet hidden/ they ache - to shudder forward...">
When Ms. Baldridge does look about her, at the lonely place where she is trapped, a housewife, she sees:
"The kitchen's locked in light
and I alone revolve
Gigantic diamond
Cutting sharp squares
Through porcelain, chrome, black metal
bone
Releasing erupted ice-cubes
in cold pyramids
The whole room a revolution
of white light and ice
Imprisoned in the centre am I
When I move
My facets are in danger of cracking
Like the shattered Window
Through which glass and snow and broken leaves
spray slowly."
And then, in 'Vision', Ms. Baldridge goes on to shatter crockery until nothing is left of her 'antique wine glasses' and 'all the good china cups' - and she resolves, tomorrow, to buy plastic.
The china and the antique wine glasses, it appears, have not helped her adjust to her life. If she imagines even in a poem that plastic will, someone should tell her she appears to be living a plastic life. There is infinitely more to life than staring as though in catatonia, through the window of life and seeing there only death.
No one can go on forever as noted in 'The Woodstock Poem': "someone is beating on the door/ that faces the stand of birches/ and nothing else/ the door opens onto a white woods/ and space."
Visually, this is a fine Fiddlehead production. And despite the gloominess of this collection Ms. Baldridge speaks with an expressive poetic voice. It is to be hoped that Ms. Baldridge may some day manage to open the doors that trap her, see more optimistically through the windows that corrupt her vision and become herself a winged bird, not a hapless victim. When and if she does, she may write poems that will sing as well as sigh. Life should be a celebration, not an ongoing dirge.
c. 1982 Rita Rosenfeld
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