today, the war dead failed to make the headlines

to keep myself human I construct a shrine of words

-Lee Sharkey, from “Neither mother nor lover”

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, Lee Sharkey found herself “in a case of acute psychic distress.” It only deepened when the Bush administration launched the war on terror.

“It seemed as if it was one assault after another after another, including an assault on language.”

This war on words – the spin, the oxymorons, the double-talk – was particularly troubling for Sharkey, a poet and editor of the Beloit Poetry Journal, who recently retired from the University of Maine at Farmington. “Peacekeeper missiles” didn’t do it for her. Neither did “the clanging of the Klaxon of freedom.”

So she fought fire with fire, or words with words, as the case may be. The resulting collection of poems, “A Darker, Sweeter String,” was recently published by Off the Grid Press.

“These poems are very much a conscious and dream-lifeway of sustaining my own sanity,” Sharkey said recently from her home in Vienna.

It was tempting to devolve into a rant, but Sharkey honed her anger into something sharper, clearer.

“The book is a voyage frommadness and the acute edge of anger toward a transformation,” Sharkey said.

That transformation of anger into peace is nothing new for Sharkey. She’s a member of the local chapter of Women in Black, an international organization founded by Palestinian and Israeli women in response to the First Intifada. Each week in Farmington, the group holds a silent peace vigil at the post office.

“When you just stand there quietly and somebody [says something rude], you feel the anger just drain right out of you into the ground,” she said.

Though the anger is gone, the language in Sharkey’s poems is raw and real. Eloquence can’t make the crater left by a suicide bomber any prettier. But it can make the reader feel:

We’re circling the hole where the ones

who abandoned us lie absent electric

we’re pacing a ring in the ground

to contain what they spilled

Her imagery is brutal, and her verse leads the reader on a journey of violence and redemption. But the journey is cathartic, and, as Maine’s Poet Laureate Betsy Sholl wrote for the book’s jacket, “mourning becomes a gift.”

It’s a concept Sharkey knows well. She wrote one of the poems in the book, the devastatingly beautiful “Unscripted,” when her son suffered a brain hemorrhage.

“That was written in order to be able to keep breathing,” she said, quietly.

The book’s title comes from a passage in Imre Kertesz’s novel “Kaddish for an Unborn Child”:

“How could I have explained to my wife that my ballpoint pen is my spade? That I write only because I have to write, and I have to write because I am whistled up every day to drive the spade deeper, to play death on a darker, sweeter string?”

Like Kertesz’s narrator, Sharkey had to write to make sense of it all. But she also had a sense of duty.

“I think the question of what poetry’s responsibility is in the civic realm comes up all the time,” Sharkey said. “More and more poets acknowledge that art for art’s sake is a dangerous oversimplification. Language is a public trust; language is what defines us and poets are the guardians of that trust.”

“A Darker, Sweeter String” is available at Borders in Bangor, Blue Hill Books in Blue Hill and Port in a Storm Bookstore in Somesville. Sharkey will hold a book launch at the Farmington Public Library at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 13.

About Off the Grid Press

“A Darker, Sweeter String” is the second title published by Off the Grid Press in Weld, founded in 2005 to publish the work of poets over age 60 “who have paid their dues but haven’t made it to the big time,” Sharkey said. Off the Grid’s in-house designer, Michael Alpert, is a Bangor photographer and director of the University of Maine Press. Editors Tam Lin Neville and Bert Stern live in Somerville, Mass. For information, visit www.offthegridpress.net.