Poet Connellan spins familiar theme in latest effort

PROVINCETOWN AND OTHER POEMS, by Leo Connellan, Curbstone Press, 77 pages, $11.

Maine poet Leo Connellan has just published his 13th volume of poetry, “Provincetown and Other Poems.”

Connellan grew up in Rockland, but at 19, he left the state to hitchhike around the country and work in San Francisco and New York. Although Connellan is now poet-in-residence of Connecticut State University, he celebrates Maine themes in his poetry and has returned for frequent readings around the state. He is especially appealing to young people, and so inspired Sandy Phippen’s Orono High School students that they started a Leo Connellan fan club with the inevitable T-shirts to express their enthusiasm.

Connellan continues his earlier themes of man’s struggle and isolation amidst a pitiless nature in “Provincetown.” The central image in this poem is a sea gull with broken wings, squawking on the sand outside of a beach motel. One of the guests pulls the curtains shut so she does not have to look at the doomed bird, whereas another seeks help from the Motel Woman who indifferently says they could feed it if they wanted to.

In a poem of polarities, Connellan dramatizes opposing points of view. The Motel Woman who lives in Provincetown does not see the town as “lovely” as does the tourist, who would soon leave. Her fisherman husband has been broken by his work and her father-in-law drowned at sea. When his leg bone “picked clean by the fish you hunt” was caught in a net, “these people … scream in horror that God might want dumb fish to have one of us every few ton.” The poet’s sympathy is still with the working people who rely on the sea for a living, and yet, he can be detached enough to understand the tourist’s pain at the sight of the dying bird, or for that matter, the poetic justice of the fish feeding on a fisherman’s flesh for a change.

Known as a working-man’s poet, Connellan also expresses empathy for the lot of the poor working woman. In “Motel,” he shows the cocktail waitress forced to appear almost naked to attract customers, and maids having to scrub carpets on their hands and knees, as he speculates about what they would do for a 20-dollar bill. The poet depicts the terror of the rape victim and the indifference of society, the “Welfare Indigent” who are scapegoated, and what poverty means — hunger, loss of electricity, death of children. In “Shooter,” he writes:

… oh, Momma you birthed us abandoned

by men, any man, a couple of steady sleepovers who

could buy shoes, food, clothes to keep coming. You

did what you could for us and now all you got

for it is headstones.

Connellan’s earliest poems, written when he was 16 — “Some Day I’ll Be Dead” and “Leaf” — dealt with the theme of mortality, but in his latest anthology, he treats not only the subject of dying with special urgency, but also in “Motel” he suggests the losses that come with aging — “even if growing old I yearned for there/to be one more offer … just one more!” Two poems concern his meditations in famous cemeteries — Pere Lachaise in Paris where Oscar Wilde is buried, and Thomas Gray’s country churchyard in England. Instead of writing, as he expresses it, with Gray’s “pleasing melancholy,” his description of death is “totally finished.”

Even though Connellan now lives in Connecticut, he has never left Maine. As in earlier poems, he continues to worry about the poverty of his native state. In “Maine,” he says the state “cannot provide for its bright youth”;

If you’re from Maine

your heart is here but nothing for you.

In the Homeric age, poetry was recited by bards before a rapt audience. Early in our own century, children used to memorize and recite poems. In the late 20th century, a poet’s audience has been reduced to a learned coterie of intellectuals. Connellan seeks to appeal to a broader audience, although he writes in the cadence of the American poetic tradition. In “Provincetown and Other Poems,” Leo Connellan has written a memorable collection of poems which suggest a cosmic acceptance of life.

Marie Mitchell Olesen Urbanski is professor emeritus of American literature at the University of Maine.