Volume 24 171
Ponsot’s poem defines as a special punchiness, a
kind of unprecedented zing.
Now in her seventies, Ponsot is the New
York–born and –bred author of three previous col-
lections—True Minds (1957), Admit Impediment
(1981) and The Green Dark(1988)—who has had a
long, distinguished career as a teacher of English lit-
erature and creative writing at Queens College and
elsewhere. In her eighties, Zychlinsky is a Holocaust
refugee who has published seven volumes of poetry
in Yiddish (between 1936 and 1993, in Poland, the
United States, France and Israel), but although in
1981 a collection was translated into German, until
now few of her poems have appeared in English. Be-
yond the almost visionary fascination with what Car-
olyn Heilbrun has called “the last gift of time” that
animates the work of both these writers, however,
each has plainly spent many years honing her art to
a fierce clarity as moving in its confrontation of the
pain and loss associated with aging as it is illumi-
nating in its revelation of age’s unexpected pleasures.
Of the two, Ponsot is (not surprisingly) the
more affirmative. Besides praising such unex-
pected intoxications of the quotidian as the bouquet
of “Pourriture Noble,” she abandons herself with
warmth, indeed with a sort of comic glee, to the
vagaries of sheer feeling. In the dazzlingly collo-
quial “One Is One,” she plays with cardiology and
literary history to produce an elegant sonnet that is
Petrarchan in theme as well as form. Beginning
with mock outrage—“Heart, you bully, you punk,
I’m wrecked, I’m shocked / stiff. You? You still
try to rule the world—though / I’ve got you: iden-
tified, starving, locked / in a cage you will not leave
alive”—this witty lyric ends with a prophetic flour-
ish of delight that concisely captures the hopeful-
ness with which Ponsot yearns to approach change:
Brute. Spy. I trusted you. Now you reel & brawl in
your cell but I’m deaf to your rages, your greed to
go solo, your eloquent threats of worse things you
(knowing me) could do. You scare me, bragging
you’re a double agent since jailers are prisoners’ pris-
oners too. Think! Reform! Make us one. Join the rest
of us, and joy may come and make its test of us.
Similarly, in “Restoring My House” she de-
scribes the salutary purification—the release from
spiritual clutter—bestowed by a voluntary bonfire
of words and images. Burning old papers, longing
to “clear out / the debris of keeping,” she insists
that the “leaves I have torn up / turn into the hum
of a / budding comfort disclosing / along a tree of
transforming,” because, tellingly, she is “hungry /
to open up images / into the presence of absence /
of images, and change.”
For Ponsot, absence is a presence, and neces-
sary losses can be cherished if they bring restora-
tion and renewal. When in “Trois Petits Tours et
Puis.. .” a son sets out on the road of life, as in a
fairytale, “She gives him paper and a fine-nibbed
pen; / he discovers the world and makes a map. /
She gives him boots and a Havaheart trap, / Peter-
son guides, tent, backpack, fish-hooks, then / re-
hearses the uses of the North Star.” But eventually
“His map omits her. His snapshots go to friends”—
at which a “fresh music fills her house, a fresh air.”
And when “Against the Dark, New Poets Rise” (in
a poem of that title) she marvels, with characteris-
tic generosity, “Look up, / there’s burning going
on, / exploding old stuff into new.”
Perhaps Ponsot’s gravest, most musical affir-
mation of the “sundown summer” of age and its
“new country” shapes the beautiful sestina “For My
Old Self, at Notre-Dame.” Here, as she contem-
plates the “dark madonna cut from a knot of wood”
who has presided for centuries over the great cathe-
dral of Paris, the poet prepares, also, for a con-
frontation with the sequential selves that slot her,
too, into history. Or, rather, catching sight of a girl
walking away on the Ile de la Cite she imagines
this young woman as her earlier self interrogating
the person she has now become, and interprets “her
Who are you?” as a wild “question raised / by see-
ing me, an old woman, in plain view.” And the
serenity with which this person she has become
now names the difference between these selves—
“Time is a tree in me; in her it’s a grain / ready to
plant”—contrasts strikingly with the fear of age and
aging that she knows the person she was once felt:
“She dreads clocks, she says. Such dry rot warps
the grain.” But Ponsot wants to teach that earlier
self, along with the rest of her audience, that “age
is not / all dry rot,” and in a resonant gesture to-
ward the magic of matrilineage, she turns to “Notre
Dame” for assistance, prayingOne Is OneFor Ponsot, absence
is a presence, and necessary
losses can be cherished if
they bring restoration and
renewal.”