`Maine Poems’ depict bleakness, beauty

MAINE POEMS by Leo Connellan, Blackberry Books, Nobleboro, Maine, 1999; 108 pages, paperback, $10.95.

On the Maine coast in the 1950s, I remember, the light was harsh. The sun scoured whitecapped blue-black waves and its blazing beauty crushed child eyes. Overcast days were solid steel and smelled like bait.

In winter, night anchored at midafternoon. Streetlamps buzzed early and stark fluorescent light glowed like cold fog. Occasionally I got hauled through sardine packing plants in this frozen twilight. Women sat at long scaly tables, kerchiefs knotted on their foreheads, cigarettes dangling from their lips. Their scissors flashed like lightning over conveyor belts, clipping heads and tails off herring. They wanted to get out of the pale, empty fluorescence and go home for supper. It was bleak beyond belief.

This is the world Leo Connellan depicts in “Maine Poems.” And beyond the incredible bleakness and almost supernatural sunlit beauty, are undersea stories of coastal life. They haunt him, and his poems drive them from their hiding places.

In his introduction, Sanford Phippen acknowledges the “ugly bitter residue” of the hardbitten existence many Mainers endured from the shipbuilding 1800s “into recent times”; this residue forms both the theme and the tone of “Maine Poems.” Connellan’s experience — which Phippen explains is the poet’s “lifelong quarrel with his hometown,” Rockland — spawns his “creative rage.”

The poet fled Rockland when he was a young man; the speaker of “Sea Gulls Wait”:

Left because of love was not understood

because I was not my father’s son in the

pride of his heart and my mother gone dead

on me. Left rather than live

penal servitude outdoors, spirit crushed, joy

turned to broken nerves, left, because I am

of the world, not a vicious niche of it.

No postcard pictures of Camden available here. To be sure, Connellan recognizes beauty — there are good reasons people from away summer in Maine:

To the granite and lime country, lobster,

plush berries popping the hills, Maine,

my Maine of wild rhubarb, sweet spruce

But there also are reasons they don’t winter, and these poems rip those reasons off the ocean bottom and lay out the sometimes funny, often pathetic and usually brutal facts that most of us would rather not hear about life in fishing communities. Facts about drunkenness, lust, scaly poverty, and meanness.

If a poem could be a lobster, it’s in this book. The language is harsh, startling; depictions of boats, factories, various kinds of starvation, people’s suffering at one another’s hands, loom with ungainly, crushing gorgeousness.

Occasionally, twisted poetic diction reflects twisted spirits. Sometimes the diction is so misshapen it’s not clear if the ambiguities are intended or the creator simply erred. But in the end it doesn’t matter. The chopped syntax mirrors chopped-up lives. And that’s the eye-piercing point of these poems. Like lobstering, reading them is not for the faint of heart, the easily offended or the romanticizers of “grinding poverty.”

It’s evident why Leo Connellan is nationally recognized, became Connecticut’s poet laureate, is regularly invited back to Maine to speak. So far, he and Carolyn Chute are our authors who have authentically evoked the bitterness of Maine’s winters.

If you can stand the astonishing bleakness, you may come away with the beauty.