Island poetry satisfies ‘Tabernacle’ pays tribute to Cranberry

TABERNACLE: POEMS OF AN ISLAND, by Susan Deborah King, Island Institute, Rockland, 2001, 75 pages, $14.50.

The islands of Maine have been known to capture the hearts of poets. Whole collections have been devoted to these offshore places. Harold Vinal’s “Hurricane Island,” Hortense Flexner’s “Poems for Sutton Island” and Phoebe Barnes Driver’s “Penobscot Island” are three such books that come to mind.

In her very fine first collection of verse, “Tabernacle: Poems of an Island,” Susan Deborah King joins this distinguished group, offering a personal inventory of Great Cranberry Island, the largest of the five Cranberry Isles that lie off the southeast end of Mount Desert Island. She writes about assorted flora and fauna, the bell buoy, beach stones, the island library and store, fog, bog and cobwebs, native-born and summer residents.

A Minnesotan during the winter, King has been a seasonal resident of Great Cranberry for many years – long enough to observe and absorb the multifaceted island. When she describes the clang of the bell buoy, for example, she clearly knows the special sound of “this angelus, rung by wave and wind.” The poet shares a fascination with this guardian of Down East waters with Great Cranberry artist William Kienbusch, who painted the gong buoys over and over.

King’s language is often rich; at times, as in the poem “Lichen,” it approaches the baroque qualities found in the work of another poet with ties to the Maine coast, the late Amy Clampitt, who spent several summers in Corea. Here are a few lines (with which, by the way, my spell check had a field day):

Nondescript

trunks come to the forefront couturiered in rippling

lobarian chitons or doilied, medallioned, diademed by

plasmata glauca, their bark ridges limned with

shimmering squamules. And in a corner,

masses of tatting enhance a magnitude of rot.

The richness of these words fits the intricate patterns of the cloth like lichen. By contrast, when paying tribute to colorful island fungi, King chooses a simpler style: “It’s as if God went around/sticking Post-It-Note haloes/on rotting trunks to say:/Take a look at this./This is good.”

Humor runs through this book like a seam of bright quartz. “Red Door” traces the reactions of neighbors and friends to a change in an exterior color scheme, while “Summer Sausage” offers a hilarious account, in the Christmas fruitcake mode, of the serial foisting off of a piece of meat (the “fancy, fandangled deli stuff” eventually finds its way to the compost). Another favorite is “Cormorants,” which King likens to “clowns with turned-out/pockets or flashers/opening overcoats-/funny faux Draculas.”

King is especially gifted at writing about the connections between human and natural worlds. Gathering beach stones, for example, inspires two marvelous studies of this ritual. We appreciate the egglike objects the poet collects, but even more so we recognize the special mind-set that goes along with the collecting. Earlier in her life King was a psychotherapist, and one feels she understands the psyche’s workings in a profound way, but in poetic, not clinical, terms.

The title of the book underscores the spiritual side of this verse, a perspective founded in the Christian tradition (and one which King shares with Abbie Huston Evans, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Sunday school teacher whose extraordinary verse bears the mark of biblical understanding). In the poem “Paying Homage,” sheets from the clothesline are folded “slow and solemn as altar cloths.” In another poem, stones gathered in Preble Cove will be used “to piece together the broken heart of God.” And a warbler observed from a window relaxes under the poet’s “ravening gaze” like “Susanna bathing before the elders” – quite a leap in imagery, yet one that we are willing to take as we read this often daring poetry.

Perhaps the greatest risk King runs in this verse relates to her portraits of islanders. These portrayals are often frank and sometimes unflattering. In the poem “Haven’s Thorns,” island residents come off as a mean lot, vengeful, destructive, abusive.

On the other hand, King’s renderings of individuals give them a special stature. Her poem to Emily Nelligan, the artist whose Bowdoin College show of charcoal drawings of Great Cranberry last year brought her national attention, is exquisite (“She could have guided Gretel and Hansel,/anyone fleeing ovens or/enduring the soul’s dark night.”). Likewise, poems in honor of oboist Sally Bloom, painters George Bunker and Edna Andrade (the latter’s artwork graces the cover of the book), composer Bill Goldberg, gardener Jan Moss and islanders Gaile Colby and Georgie Ware are beautifully written.

Most moving of these portraits is one dedicated to Esther Rome, wife of painter Herzl Rome, whose work was shown at College of the Atlantic this summer. Ravaged by cancer, she still manages to direct the planting of her island garden, including the “proud, monarchic” black-red snapdragons that bear her standard “into the dark and cold.”

The poet finds solace, comfort and refuge on Great Cranberry. The island offers a respite from melancholy and mainland concerns. It is a place of renewal and repose, where one person stretches an electrical cord onto the lawn to hold a tea ceremony while another raises all manner of livestock “maybe to cancel years of want.”

King is not the first poet to pay tribute to Great Cranberry. In the remarkable “Views from the Island,” published in 1978, Charles Wadsworth undertook a similar inventorying via a collection of 72 sonnets. The subjects are similar: mail boat, blueberries, the shingle beach, fog and friends. King quotes a line from Wadsworth – “I plead a nativity of the heart”-and pays homage to another poet who frequented the Cranberries, Rachel Field, whose famous verse “If Once You Have Slept Upon an Island” remains the touchstone of so many island lives.

“Tabernacle” attempts to represent a special community, one of only 11 Maine islands with “native villages,” as King notes in the poem “Store.” And it succeeds, by recognizing, as Wadsworth once wrote, that “the austere enchantments of a Maine island are its own closely guarded secrets.”