Coursen’s latest work substantial collection Poet’s sonnets careful, vivid, unpretentious

ANOTHER THURSDAY: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, by H.R. Coursen, The Mathom Bookshop, Dresden, Maine, 2002, 128 pages, paperback, $9.95.

The weather this April being crueler than usual, it’s refreshing to run across a poetry collection that reminds us of the excellence National Poetry Month seeks to uphold. H.R. Coursen’s 28th book of poems, “Another Thursday,” evocatively roams the past 60 years or so, mixing memories from the poet’s past with the heartaches of history through 2002.

The gist of this book appears in the imagery of the closing stanza of the sonnet titled “12 September 2001.” I guess there is no need to remind anyone of what day that followed.

The sky just is today. A lower bird or two

will darkly touch a moment in the woods. The cove

will tremble and smooth out again, but no

thing reflects or echoes to remove

the water from itself. Seldom so.

The trees may nod, but it is quiet above.

The stillness in this imagery is intense, and is the essential feeling of those days each autumn in Maine when the whole of heaven seems to have settled with a supernatural pause in the air and the trees.

But more, the intensity of “12 September 2001” lives not only in the imagery but also in its suggestion of a larger reality. It is “quiet above” not only because the beauty of fall has lighted for a moment, but because no airplanes are flying overhead as they routinely did just 48 hours before. The poem awakens us to one of the most bewildering of life’s unavoidable facts: Intense beauty exists concurrently with intense grief. “Another Thursday” calls constant attention, like this, to the subtle ways our intensely personal lives are bound up in larger realities, inner as well as historical.

At every turn, Coursen’s language is careful, vivid and unpretentious. He clearly is a poet who allows each poem to find its own form instead of worrying a thought or sentiment into acceptably unfamiliar prosodic shapes. And as often as not the form is the sonnet – 14 lines in two parts of eight and six lines, rhymed. They cover everything from a high school football memory, to a power outage, to Sunday morning. The quirks of his enjambed lines notwithstanding, Coursen writes sonnets as well as anyone from Maine since Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Herb Coursen of Brunswick is a retired professor of literature from Bowdoin College. He has won a number of prizes for his poetry, and in 1996 was named by Penn State University one of the 25 “Master Teachers of Shakespeare” of the last 100 years. He flew fighter jets in the 1950s, has been a runner-up for the National Book Award, and has written verse dramas in addition to his volumes of poetry.

The poems in “Another Thursday” are not trying to be more than they are, and are indeed substantial, like a revitalizing spring rain in the often dry, self-absorbed world of contemporary poetry. Anyone who’s conversant with the modern poetic idiom, and who reads for the feel of fall that permeates everything from war to watching sports on TV, can do few things better for his soul with $10, here in National Poetry Month, than to buy this book.