I have to be careful as a reader of poetry to allow enough room for the diversity of voices and approaches. For instance, very early on I was struck, convinced, intoxicated with Jack Gilbert's work. Nearly every line of his was alive to me with heat, with intellectual muscle and sexual alertness. I knew of his relationship with Linda Gregg, but when I encountered her work it seemed to lack the vitality that I was so easily attracted to. Perhaps I needed another decade of loss and pain to whittle my own stomping and neighing down to a whimper to be able to hear her quieter, more nuanced writing, to receive her more truly in my life-humbled core.
I've been spending time recently with her New and Selected Poems, All of It Singing. Her wisdom and reserve speak to me now in deep and surprising ways. I can't say that I feel every poem lands, exactly, but there are most definitely sage lines and images that I will carry away with me and that have in some ways become me, or helped me to understand my deepening relationship with quiet, grief and reflection.
Perhaps a whole life of writing is worth it for one pure line. Her poem “The Heart Flowing Out” begins, “All things we see are the shapes death makes.” I'm reminded of the Spinoza quote, “A free man thinks of nothing less than of death; and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life.” In her poem “A Dark Thing Inside the Day” she writes, “Everything desirable is here already in abundance.” In “What If the World Stays Always Far Off” she writes, “An apple has all colors. Even blue.”
And if I can be permitted to move beyond a single line, I'll conclude with two poems.
The first, originally published in Too Bright to See (1981), shames me for not receiving her feminine voice earlier. Even in alluding to the poem, my face flushes to red,
Whole and Without Blessing
What is beautiful alters, has undertow.
Otherwise I have no tactics to begin with.
Femininity is a sickness. I open my eyes
out of this fever and see the meaning
of my life clearly. A thing like a hill.
I proclaim myself whole and without blessing,
or need to be blessed. A fish of my own
spirit. I belong to no one. I do not move.
Am not required to move. I lie naked on a sheet.
and the indifferent sun warms me.
I was bred for slaughter, like the other
animals. To suffer exactly at the center,
where there are no clues except pleasure.
Then from In the Middle Distance (2006),
Waiting
When I chewed a bay leaf and rubbed
sage on my hands and arms, I believed
it was in order not to scare the deer.
Which was true. Later I thought it was
so my soul could be read by God.
Now I suspect it was a way for me
to become hidden. When you came to court me
for my body and hair, I was not there,
even though I had washed and dressed
for the occasion. Did you see me stare
beneath the courtesies? I was waiting
for someone to want that. To want
the moon by itself. For the quiet
of the herd. Of the stones under the water
in the creek flickering. Seeming to move,
but not moving. Together with everything
that's here.
With time, she has become a quiet god to me. And if not a god, a most human angel.
— Erin Wilson’s poems have appeared in EVENT, Vallum, TAR, Dalhousie Review, The Ex-Puritan, Queen’s Quarterly, Freefall, Verse Daily, and elsewhere internationally. The title poem from her collection, Blue, won a Pushcart. She lives a small life on Robinson-Huron Treaty Territory, in Northern Ontario, Canada. Her dearest friends are trees.
You can read Erin Wilson’s poem "The Messenger" in Issue 306 (Winter 2026). Order the issue now!
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