Jane Mead's To the Wren Reviewed at The Rumpus

Barbara Berman reviews Jane Mead's To the Wren: Collected & New Poems 1991-2019 (Alice James Books, 2019) for The Rumpus. "Jane Mead has had a long and distinguished career and [the book] still feels fresh, all five-hundred-plus pages," writes Berman. More:

Mead’s versatility, scholarship, and curiosity contribute the strength of her craft, and her italicized, fifteen line poem “Magna Carta” is devastating and resonant, formed solely of direct quotes from the document. The city of London,” referred to as a female, with “her liberties and free customs— / All Archbishops, Bishops Abbots, Priors, Templars— / Shall have their liberties and free customs.” The rub Mead makes raw is the fact that the officials she lists had power that kept women from having liberty. In the New York Times Book Review, authors are often asked in interviews who they’d invite to a literary dinner party. Mead makes me wish I could break bread with her, along with some of those authority figures, and the women whose lives they controlled. Her oeuvre is so spacious that it constantly invites journeys down imagined avenues.

The Magna Carta is bred in the bone of every American project, and so it’s no leap to go from there to many satisfying poems that have heartbreaking connections to men with power. “Money,” Mead’s poem about the Don Pedro Dam, brings to mind Cadillac Desert, the late Marc Reisner’s prose classic about America’s Western water wars. “[T]he water didn’t even belong to the river. / The water didn’t belong to the water,” Mead writes at the end of the piece, the river having been “the once-green Tuolumne,” where the “minnows could have some wiggle room, / so the salmon could lunge far enough/ to spawn, so that there would be more salmon…” The stately logic and sound are a tragic indictment writ larger than the dam itself.

People who live on farms have complex relationships with “domesticated” animals, and when the animals die, they are all worthy of what Mead bestows, the “formal feeling” Emily Dickinson and Seamus Heaney understood so well...

The full review is at The Rumpus.