McNair to Brinkerhoff #4

Funny thing, I thought of this very passage when envisioning the cover — that unfastening from the sorrow and conflict we are born to (and bound to) in our lives on earth. And bingo, this is the passage you pick out.

 

You’re surely right that the passage is crucial to the book, leading not only to the sorrows and losses that are up ahead, but the “refastenings” that are possible on the very earth we dream of being released from.

 

The book suggests (or so I tell myself) that a refastening (so to speak) takes a special quality of sight — hence the repetition of sight and seeing in the poems that deal with the pursuit of beauty in the second half of section three, and the God-in-the-eye image at the end of “Losses,” the first poem of section four. Section four is the one that affirms refastening, suggesting poem by poem how it can be done.

 

But when I give you this quick gloss about unfastening/refastening, I think I may interfere with the complexity of your own thoughts. Did you have another way of looking at three and four? — another way, that is, of speaking about the movement through and out of darkness in three, and the affirmation of four?

 

I get the feeling from what you’ve said about the passage you chose that the reverberations of the lifting away and levitation are more complicated than I’ve made them…And that rather than pressing this fastening/ refastening thing in the book description, we ought to let the relationship between the title poem and the rest of the collection speak for itself…

 

Your thoughts?

 

W