Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works Book

Lorine Niedecker lived a life as spare as Emily Dickinson's but without the isolation. She did marry late in life, and had contact with a few poets who championed her poetry and influenced her development. That spare poetry reminds me of Dickinson in its ability to jar the reader awake to the world she writes about. Her poems are short and sharp enough to slice existence into pieces you can focus on and hold in the mind--this is what it is, what I see is what you'll find. Follow me. One section is called "Homemade/Handmade Poems." They do have that feel, as of folk poems. The nature she recretes is that of the lake country of rural Wisconsin. The years she and the reader most vividly experience are the 30s, when she was at the peak of her powers, and make me want to call them folk poems. Their beauty and succinctness remind me of haiku. In fact, Niedecker several times mentioned Basho, a Japanese master of the form. Consider the simple beauty here: The man of law/on the uses/of grief//The poet/on the law/of the oak leaf.