Shawl
for M.P.
Shadow of a skein of geese going south.
The briefest of passages across the gray
pond’s surface. Sighs from a slight breeze.
Rows of small stitches. As I write this, already
they’ve been ripped out. Your husband’s dying.
Family from here and there arrive. There’s no
space I can find to slip in beside you. His dying
rows forward. On the far other side of this
city, I begin a shawl for you, three skeins
of the softest wool I’ve ever worked. Wrap each yarn-
over stitch for the eyelets, lengthening line
of them, knitting me and you now in the nowhere
of grief. Sorrowful gray background of the shawl
I hold in my lap, hold you as I shape holes
according to the pattern, count, count again
the stitches. Single row pattern, easy to lose
track, forget the loop’s second half-wrap
in the yarn-over stitch. Twenty years widowed,
I’m still rowing back and forth. The skein of his shadow,
swift swoop across my knitting. What can Ido
against the coming long winter but wrap you in
wool with warm rust streaks, strands of silver sky?
Shadow of a skein of geese going south.
The briefest of passages across the gray
pond’s surface. Sighs from a slight breeze.
Rows of small stitches. As I write this, already
they’ve been ripped out. Your husband’s dying.
Family from here and there arrive. There’s no
space I can find to slip in beside you. His dying
rows forward. On the far other side of this
city, I begin a shawl for you, three skeins
of the softest wool I’ve ever worked. Wrap each yarn-
over stitch for the eyelets, lengthening line
of them, knitting me and you now in the nowhere
of grief. Sorrowful gray background of the shawl
I hold in my lap, hold you as I shape holes
according to the pattern, count, count again
the stitches. Single row pattern, easy to lose
track, forget the loop’s second half-wrap
in the yarn-over stitch. Twenty years widowed,
I’m still rowing back and forth. The skein of his shadow,
swift swoop across my knitting. What can Ido
against the coming long winter but wrap you in
wool with warm rust streaks, strands of silver sky?
Since you published with Crab Creek Review, how has your work grown or changed? What excites you now that maybe didn’t back then?
“Shawl” was written after my second collection, Incarnate Grace, came out in 2015. In that collection I explored the many meanings of “margin” after my surgeon reported the margins around my breast cancer lumpectomy were “clean but not ideal.” At the time I was writing “Shawl” I was still interested in exploiting a word’s various meanings.
But I did make a conscious turn to pay more attention to the sonic power of words, to let sound drive my lines, to write sound to sound. In particular, I applied this attention to landscape description. My third collection Toward has poems where the theme of walking through landscapes is subject or background but where a focus on sound is also part of the picture.
In 2015 I also began thinking about making a collection about my maternal grandmother, a seamstress at the end of the 19th century/early 20th in Paris and then, in Boston. But because I know little about her, I decided to use French and American Impressionists paintings to imagine the world in which she lived and worked. But before beginning ekphrastic poems for what would become my fourth collection & Company, I first spent a great deal of time researching the artists of that period, its fashion industry and its mores and manners.
Is there a particular piece of advice you received that you found yourself returning to as you’ve written over the years? Is there any advice you would give to writers submitting their work?
A piece of advice I received early on: give every poem “drawer time” before you submit it. Or write hot, edit cold. Give the first significant draft time to cool off. Lots of time. And then some more. Ditto for the second significant draft. And again. I still fail to always follow this principle. But when I do, I fare much better.
What are you reading?
I don’t always finish books I start. So it is more honest to tell you about books I recently did finish and was taken by. Among them: Cindy Veach’s Her Kind, Dan Beachy-Quick’s A Whaler’s Dictionary, Elizabeth Bradfield’s Toward Antarctica and David Whyte’s Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. And let me add Alison Hawthorne Deming’s book of essays, A Woven World: On Fashion, Fishermen, and the Sardine Dress. For my soul, to right my ship, I keep Seamus Heaney’s The Spirit Level and the works of Gerard Manley Hopkins close. To say what I am, present tense, actually reading: I have just begun two books given to me as gifts that have captured me: Ross Gay’s A Book of Delights and Moby-Dick in Pictures, by Matt Kish. Waiting on my nightstand for longer than I wanted it to be is George Saunder’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.
What are you working on?
I wish I could say exactly. After the intense focus of turning ekphrastic poems into a biography of sorts about my grandmother, after the intense focus of trying to market Toward and & Company which came out during the pandemic, I am simply being a writer. I am making poems. Some are about whatever landscape is before me. Some are in response to what I am reading. Some are paying attention to what is happening to and in my aging body. And some are narrative vignettes about the childhoods of people in my life.
Craft-wise, I can note that in my last collection I started to work on having the form of a poem fit its subject. I am continuing to look for ways to have new poems do just that.
“Shawl” was written after my second collection, Incarnate Grace, came out in 2015. In that collection I explored the many meanings of “margin” after my surgeon reported the margins around my breast cancer lumpectomy were “clean but not ideal.” At the time I was writing “Shawl” I was still interested in exploiting a word’s various meanings.
But I did make a conscious turn to pay more attention to the sonic power of words, to let sound drive my lines, to write sound to sound. In particular, I applied this attention to landscape description. My third collection Toward has poems where the theme of walking through landscapes is subject or background but where a focus on sound is also part of the picture.
In 2015 I also began thinking about making a collection about my maternal grandmother, a seamstress at the end of the 19th century/early 20th in Paris and then, in Boston. But because I know little about her, I decided to use French and American Impressionists paintings to imagine the world in which she lived and worked. But before beginning ekphrastic poems for what would become my fourth collection & Company, I first spent a great deal of time researching the artists of that period, its fashion industry and its mores and manners.
Is there a particular piece of advice you received that you found yourself returning to as you’ve written over the years? Is there any advice you would give to writers submitting their work?
A piece of advice I received early on: give every poem “drawer time” before you submit it. Or write hot, edit cold. Give the first significant draft time to cool off. Lots of time. And then some more. Ditto for the second significant draft. And again. I still fail to always follow this principle. But when I do, I fare much better.
What are you reading?
I don’t always finish books I start. So it is more honest to tell you about books I recently did finish and was taken by. Among them: Cindy Veach’s Her Kind, Dan Beachy-Quick’s A Whaler’s Dictionary, Elizabeth Bradfield’s Toward Antarctica and David Whyte’s Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. And let me add Alison Hawthorne Deming’s book of essays, A Woven World: On Fashion, Fishermen, and the Sardine Dress. For my soul, to right my ship, I keep Seamus Heaney’s The Spirit Level and the works of Gerard Manley Hopkins close. To say what I am, present tense, actually reading: I have just begun two books given to me as gifts that have captured me: Ross Gay’s A Book of Delights and Moby-Dick in Pictures, by Matt Kish. Waiting on my nightstand for longer than I wanted it to be is George Saunder’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.
What are you working on?
I wish I could say exactly. After the intense focus of turning ekphrastic poems into a biography of sorts about my grandmother, after the intense focus of trying to market Toward and & Company which came out during the pandemic, I am simply being a writer. I am making poems. Some are about whatever landscape is before me. Some are in response to what I am reading. Some are paying attention to what is happening to and in my aging body. And some are narrative vignettes about the childhoods of people in my life.
Craft-wise, I can note that in my last collection I started to work on having the form of a poem fit its subject. I am continuing to look for ways to have new poems do just that.
Moira Linehan is the author of four collections of poetry. In 2020 she had two books come out: Toward from Slant Books as well as & Company from Dos Madres Press. Her first two collections, If No Moon (2007) and Incarnate Grace (2015) were published by Southern Illinois University Press. If No Moon had been selected by Dorianne Laux as winner of the 2006 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry open competition. Both were named honor books in the Massachusetts Book Awards. Linehan lives in the greater Boston area.