On Feb. 22 in Reeder Hall, English and Theatre Arts department chair Thomas Lipinski introduced faculty emerita Nola Garrett, who read from her new book of poetry, “The Dynamite Maker’s Mistress” to a crowd of students and current faculty. The title of the book derives from a poem of the same name, about Alfred Nobel (the inventor of dynamite) and his mistress.
Garrett’s new publication features 39 sestinas, all with variations on the form, which traditionally features six stanzas containing six lines each and an envoy, which is a summation or dedication. The end words for the line are then repeated according to a set pattern, or as Garrett put it for her choice of words, “five ordinary words, and one off-word.” It is, by all accounts, difficult to write in this poetic form.
The first poem Garrett read was “Getting up and leaving.”
“The Dynamite Maker’s Mistress,”which Garrett described as “a little witty, sometimes crazy,” was the result of time she spent at Yaddo, an artist community in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. At Yaddo, her room was above where Sylvia Plath and her husband, Ted Hughes, stayed when they took up residency there.
A poem resulted from this fact in “Apple hearts for Sylvia Plath,” which is the first poem Garrett wrote for the book.
She followed up “Apple hearts for Sylvia Plath” with the poems “Letter home” and “Courier,” which Garrett described as a short story written in what she called a “double sestina” form, meaning both the beginning and ending words of the lines are repeated in a pattern. Garrett also went on to say that the poem features two speakers and parts of it are italicized. She followed those up with reading “Cadenza for Arnaut Daniel,” describing the writing process as “frightening”; Arnaut Daniel was the inventor of the sestina.
After reading from her book, Garrett began discussing her translations of Macedonian poet Radovan Pavlovski’s work. Garret worked with her daughter-in-law Natasha to translate poems such as “Oarsmen,” “Big men, small country,” and “Before you fall asleep.”
Garrett won the 1998 American Poets’ Prize for her chapbook “The Pastor’s Wife Considers Pinball.” Her poems, essays and translations have appeared in literary magazines such as the Georgia Review, the Tampa Review, Poetry Northwest, Christian Century, FIELD and Arts Letters.
“The Dynamite Maker’s Mistress,” published by David Roberts Books, is available on Amazon.com.
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