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committed by way of some built-in distance, some
inaccessibility, some frustrating withholding of
self. The artist/lover meticulously witnesses her
own memories to make present the deceased and
to more fully know the complicated and sometimes
enigmatic person who has died. In this sense, the
act of writing these poems extends and deepens a
relationship that will have no end while the speaker
lives, and we are left with a complicated, fully hu-
man profile of the deceased, described through eyes
that have paid and are still paying very close
attention.
These are carefully crafted poems, but the craft
(except in the poem “Box”) never becomes self-
conscious to the point of undermining the core,
driving sentiment. Even in the poem “Box,” how-
ever, where we become conscious of the artist’s joy
in the artifice of the poem momentarily dislocating
the core grief that is the occasion of the poem, we
somehow don’t mind, seeing the possible healing
that awaits all of us in the transformation of grief.
The transformative power of this poet manifests it-
self at times in poetic images that blaze into star-
tling metaphoricity. Consider: “crystal flutes of
ruined grape, we lifted them—/ afloat in the pool
in the cliff hung over the sea” or “we saw human
forms // suspended over the sea: the hang-gilders
at sunset... / all our shining ambivalent love air-
borne there before us.” Sparrowis an eloquent and
beautifully written book.
Source:Fred L. Dings, Review of Sparrow, in World
Literature Today, Vol. 78, No. 3–4, September–December
2004, pp. 101–102.
Liz Rosenberg
In the following review of Sparrow, Rosenberg
asserts that, in Sparrow, a collection focused on
her recently deceased husband, Muske-Dukes has
managed to “capture and immortalize the shifting,
mortal beauty of a living being.”
In this season of summer wedding parties, it’s
touching to find a pair of books largely about mar-
riage, by two highly prized American poets. Carol
Muske-Dukes’s heart breaking Sparrowcatalogs
the infinite faces of marriage in poems that mourn
and celebrate her husband, the late actor David
Dukes. Maxine Kumin’s The Long Marriagehon-
ors her partnership to her husband, Victor, while
extending “marriage” to lifelong relationships to
other beloveds: poetry, poets’ friends, gardens,
the body, and a Noah’s ark of animals, from the
“scarlet tanager / who lights in the apple tree” to
cattle, sheep, and horses. Both books are gorgeous,
densely layered, melancholy, comical, and
moving—all the more so upon rereading.
Sparrowis almost unbearably sad in its exact
recounting of loss, but I want to emphasize that “al-
most,” since its beauty and intelligence keep both
the poems and the reader pulling steadily forward.
Sparrowcircles around the vortex of a particular
absence, the death of one’s beloved. “On my study
floor, the books were piled high. ‘you stepped over
them, smiling, as you came in / to kiss me good-
night.” Muske-Dukes musters her considerable
powers to come to an understanding of her grief—
if not a victory over it, at least the momentary stay
against confusion that is one of poetry’s gifts.
Sparrowrefuses to rest, to reside in answers.
Instead the poet reexamines the past—“I lift my
face, distracted, still, for your late, tender kiss”—
calibrating each of her actor-husband’s mercurial
faces, her own shock and grief, hurling questions
against herself: “Was I sleeping, while the others
suffered?”; “Where did I / imagine the heart would
go? To danger?”; and, in the dazzling and deadly
poem “The Call”: “That nurse in a distant blazing
room / beginning to take shape before my eyes /
paused, then put my question back to me. / Did I
want to be told what was happening to you?”
In the story of this particular marriage, this
early death and all its aftershocks, Muske-Dukes
does for her beloved what Shakespeare in his son-
nets sought to do for his—to capture and immor-
talize the shifting, mortal beauty of a living being.
Her husband is often figured as a hawk—beautiful,
swift, largely untamable, always on the verge of
motion: “You turned back / once to look at me over
your shoulder, opening the Stage / Door. Not yet
made up, but already a stranger, the hawk staring
out of your face.” The poet is apparently a more
domestic bird: “The sparrow I brought / home in
my hand outlived you.” If a sparrow in her own
self-figuration, she is thrushlike in the sad beauty
of her singing—a blue morpho’s wings seen
“stained with the color of the afterlife,” the actor
playing a part: “You are Algernon. You have been /
Algernon before, though not tonight’s / Algernon.”
She deeply understood her husband’s art, and she
deeply understands her own, rendering even deep-
est sorrow as lovely, as haunting as birdsong.
Source:Liz Rosenberg, “On Unions, Sundered or Endur-
ing,” in Boston Sunday Globe, August 3, 2003, p. 1.Roger Gathman
In the following essay on the occasion of the
publication of Muske-Dukes’s third novel, Life
after Death, Gathman profiles her writing life.Our Side