Incandescent Poems Filled with Sorrow, Regret, Wisdom, and Light: Lee Sharkey's I Will Not Name It Except to Say

Sharkey’s eighth and final book of poems—a single volume momento mori completed in the last weeks of her life in 2020—is divided into seven sections, each section comprised of anywhere from six-to-twelve poems collected and cordoned off by a unifying theme: 1) Sharkey’s seventy-something husband Al’s advance into dementia; 2) a set of short prose still lives about the Holocaust survivor and visual artist, Samuel Bak; 3) a series of ten ekphrastic poems exploring the paintings of seven German Expressionist painters: Paul Klee, Franz Marc, Otto Dix, August Macke, George Grosz, and Kathe Kollwitz); 4) poems about the Warsaw Ghetto depicting the horrors of Jewish genocide; 5) ghostly recollections of Sharkey’s long-dead mother and father; 6) one long poem about the imprisonment and murder of the Marxist philosopher Rosa Luxemburg; and finally, 7) late, last poems bearing witness to Sharkey’s own impending death (At 75, Sharkey died of pancreatic cancer, still writing, late in 2020).

Perhaps because she was dying as she wrote the poems, death is the book’s central theme and it appears everywhere, in every poem. Another major theme is empathy: empathy for Franz Marc’s blue monkeys gassed as guinea pigs and howling in pain, and empathy for the fate of all the animals in this world of predatory man, where men make mincemeat of the animals they are supposed to care for and discard and disparage the men and women they live among, such as in the Warsaw Ghetto where the Jewish body is stripped, raped, burned, spat on, clubbed, despised, and disfigured.

Another major theme is religion. In “Tashlich,” Sharkey writes, “I have Jewish feet and a feet-on-the-ground stubbornness.” The poems are sprinkled throughout with Jewish words, songs, and traditions. Sometimes Sharkey settles down admiringly into them, as if to caress the holy books, the Torah, dolls and figures, tabernacles, old testament narratives and iconographies. But she also sometimes turns her face away, rejecting these traditions, disappointed in teachings that prove ineffectual in a world where heinousness prevails.

Sharkey is an ekphrastic poet, deeply sympathetic to painters, especially the German Expressionists who took as their subject the horrors of war. (Sharkey’s mother’s cousin, Giselle, perished in the Lvov death camps.) Section Two is a long series of one-paragraph prose poems dedicated to Samual Bak, a visual artist who survived the Holocaust and lives and paints in his eighties in Western Massachusetts. The petite prose poems in this section are thin and delicate as eggshells breaking open to reveal the yellow planets of their insides. They are superb little still lives depicting pears, fruit bowls, sarcophagi, shadows, and translucent light, like miniature Jewish deities tucked in carved boxes beside bedside tables with lit lamps and narrow beds, the itinerary of everyday Polish-German-Jewish life laid against the context of chaos, the horror of death camps prowling in the dark, black forest beyond the door. 

Section Three’s poems describe a series of ten German Expressionist paintings. In great swirling slabs of red and blue, Franz Marc deplores the throat-slash and burn of bomb-sacrificed forest animals and the horrors of humans dying not in old age or by natural causes but by the inconceivable wickedness of war. One of the most powerful of this set of poems is Sharkey’s meditation on Otto Dix’s painting, “Dead Man in Mud.” In lines as powerful of Seamus Heaney’s “The Tolland Man” which describes the digging up of a body sacrificed in the Iron Age’s ritual killings, the poem captures the frozen spectacle of a dead man’s forearm and fist reaching up from the mud. Otto Dix stated that war is “a horrible thing” that he nevertheless “does not want to miss.” Sharkey also does not want to miss the horrifying images of war, for the frozen arm “pin[s] our eyes to the crime.” “Grief lives in the ground,” Sharkey writes. “It cannot be extinguished / joy nests in its arms.”

The next section’s poem-cluster focuses on the Warsaw Ghetto. In it, Sharkey describes the Holocaust grimly, naming it “X” as if “X” were the unsayable thing, the thing that is so invested with pain it cannot be named without one’s hair standing on end. In a play on Holocaust deniers Sharkey begins the poem: “x happened can we agree x happened / x happened and then fire happened / and then they fell into a red salt pool / in a sea of exile who was to take them in?” Again, in this poem grouping, Sharkey compares animal with human suffering, describing the ultra-efficient technology of murder; the well-thought-through slaughter of the death camps: “to study the butterfly,” Sharkey writes, “to chloroform it, pin it to the wall.”

Wanting to be remembered, wanting to record their beautiful lives for history’s sake, the Warsaw Ghetto Jews, sensing their coming deaths, dig with shovels in the dirt in the frightening poem “Thieves,” preparing a bed for papers and diaries, “every endless day detailed for retrieval.”  As if to soothe a frightened rabbi, baby or mob, by poem’s end, Sharkey arrives at  resignation and spring’s green, the promise of renewal. “Rage cedes to intimacy,” she writes, and from papers and diaries left like braille-heaped seeds of buried codes in the ground, “shoots” will grow, allowing poems to surface and paint “the ceiling between heaven and earth.”

In the fifth section, Sharkey remembers and eulogizes the ghostly forms of her remembered parents—perhaps a common preoccupation for those preparing to die. In three poems dedicated to her father and three to her mother, she depicts them: her father preparing to leave for work in the morning in his great coat fixing his fedora on his head in front of a mirror and her mother doing housework, fluffing a tablecloth, straightening the path of the cloth with a gentle tug and smoothing it flat on the table with practiced palms. In the tablecloth poem, Sharkey stresses how intently she studied her mother as a child: tossing a cloth that then sifts mutely down through air “the wings spread[ing] before landing/ the wings spread[ing] before landing.” The gentleness and silence in this poem between the tossed out cloth and its wing-spread, dove-like landing is typical of Sharkey, who packs silence into most of these poems, both by the soft sibilants that pour from her perfect ear and by the frequent double-spacing of the lines so the reader has to fall through a blank silent space to land on each next line. 

In Section Six, again in an ekphrastic poem, Sharkey eulogizes Rosa Luxemburg through re-imagining Virginia Woolf’s painterly Lily (from To the Lighthouse) and the real-life painter May Stevens’s portrait of the murder and then the cruel, sloppy, needless dumping into a canal of Rosa Luxemborg’s body. For her no-nonsense murder by German state paramilitaries, the radical-social-Marxist philosopher Rosa Luxemburg was struck in the skull with a rifle butt, shot in the head, and then flung into Berlin’s Landwehr Canal. In a side-narrative underscoring Sharkey’s hyper-sensitivity, the poem imagines Luxemburg nightly in her prison cell listening through a small crevice of window to the torture of a neighborhood child working itself up to a sobbing cry before the child’s heartless mother, absorbed in other things, slaps the child silent.

In the final section—in Sharkey’s most luminous, paper-thin poems—Sharkey details the strangling inklings and prophecies of her own fast-approaching death by pancreatic cancer. Never in fear, always in absorption, she spies the perimeters of her life, often depicted in biblical terms and narratives—and settles into her deathbed without regret or rage or blame. Again there is always the shadow of a God’s mercy bowing low over her; a flower seen through the window, and the strangeness of the afterlife seeping in—slow as blood, inevitable as sorrow.

If you step away, what are Sharkey’s poems like? To say these Holocaust-laden poems are grim understates. Nevertheless, pleasure abides. Blue and yellow flowers crop up unexpectedly everywhere, creeping through the edges of ladder-vines. At times, Sharkey rails like Job against the unjust might of God. At other times, as if speaking through an emotion “recollected in tranquility” in pain Wordsworth described as lying “too deep for tears,” she resigns herself before that might, saying “therefore I will be quiet, comforted that I am dust.” Ironically, quietness presides in this paean to bombs and war, whether as static wonder or shock. The poems portray the stark gaze of the mud-buried man and the living gaze of the human poet-spectator, expression-ed in a state of wonder. 

I am a poet as well as a literary critic and one of my first thoughts on finishing these absorbing, incandescent poems filled with sorrow, regret, philosophy, wisdom, and light, was: why bother? I shall never write poems as good as these. But then I thought why not? What have I got to lose? As Sharkey writes, the bibles and vesicles of all literature lie sleepy in their beds waiting for spring to move and brush-heads to rise, ready to swipe with paint, in a “peace that surpasses all understanding,” blue skies blue again.