Shelter derives from the Old English scyldtruma, meaning “roof or wall formed by locked shields.” I’ve come to look on Ellen Bryant Voigt’s poem “Roof,” from Headwaters, framed and in view from my desk, as itself a kind of shield. In praising her roof—the efficacy of its color, design, and construction; how efficiently it lets go its burdens—Voigt offers a dual portrait of endurance and protection (and their limits); the poem is also a paean to structure. Its fierce exactitude and adamantine clarity is fortifying in the best of times but especially now, as its praise of a man-made barrier conjures human endurance and familial protection, recognizes the trials and losses behind the strongest human facades.
Laura Jensen’s “Shelter,” from her 1985 collection of the same name, is a quiet poem of nested interiors which passes in the time it takes to bake a loaf of bread. Where Voigt sets the human and man-made in comparison, Jensen—her speaker as vulnerable and muted as Voigt’s is formidable—focuses on the divisions and connections between the human and natural worlds. She finds a woodpecker dead on her porch, having flown against the door’s window or jamb; her own place of shelter has proven a fatal barrier to it. After putting the bird into a box of styrofoam pellets, she buries it under a hawthorn bush beside the house, then goes back inside. The charged air in Jensen’s poems—both wild and tame, suffused with calm and threat, ever-alert to all that is permeable and impermanent— is, it seems to me, what we’re breathing right now. But she conjures an interior hearth from the winds she carries in memory, and the last image, the last air, is the bread–the oatmeal loaf risen, baked, pulled from the oven.
Both poems make something of what we can’t keep out, provide their own sheltering. Both shade, a bit, the harsh brilliance of this late March morning in Asheville. Open window, blue mountains, a wing of overcast advancing. Shelter begins with “The Storm” (“A snowstorm surrounds the house/ with a glass ball”) and ends with “Shelter”; Headwaters ends with “Roof” followed by “Storm” (“you got sick you got well you got sick/ the lilac bush we planted is a tree…”). Praise, then, to what provides refuge on either side: these models of endurance and the persistence of imagination—what they contain and what they open us to.
We’ve invited the faculty of the MFA Program for Writers to send us paragraphs on their current reading for a new series, SHELTER. We’ll be posting these regularly over the next couple of weeks.
Debra Allbery
