A poet’s new book explores the art of seeing

SALISBURY — Lakeville resident and longtime Hotchkiss School Poet-in-Residence Susan Kinsolving writes poetry known for its subtle meaning and musicality. Her poems can “bring us in tantalizing proximity to the radiant mysteries that prowl just beyond the sphere of the senses,” notes a fellow poet in advance praise for “Peripheral Vision,” Kinsolving’s fourth book, just published by Red Hen Press.

In the poem “Glass Eyes,” for instance, she explores the dim possibilities for other glass prosthetics: A glass leg would crack. A glass ear might shatter. A glass heart would break and never mend. It ends with the line: “No, only glass eyes will do, looking alive while utterly untrue.”

In “Frankie Minh,” the adopted Vietnamese daughter of an American actress hides her new eyes “like plundered treasures among her dolls and socks.”

The ocularists

Inspired by the tribulations of a former neighbor who was shot in a Texas mugging and lost his eye, Kinsolving was first intrigued by the prosthesis he got to replace it, then fascinated by the combination of art, science  and skill possessed by ocularists, as those whose profession is creating these miraculous replacements are called. 

Over the years she studied their history and modern origins in mid 19th-century Germany. She also visited the Smithsonian’s extensive collection of eyes and once spent a day with a family of ocularists at their famous Manhattan clinic.

While much of her new collection investigates glass eyes both as fact and metaphor (who knew that Helen Keller’s “big blue eyes” were glass, and later acrylic when technology improved?), other poems hover at the edge of personal recollection and family dissonance, reflecting often uncomfortable perspectives from which we view each other’s lives. 

In “To Her in Hollywood,” she pleads with an actress daughter, “Put a continent between us and still I will call.” 

In “Fill the Cavity with Crumbs,” which memorably ran in The New York Times on Thanksgiving Day 2003, she asks, “who knew a frozen turkey took three days to thaw?” and notes that “my almost-ex overcooked cranberries until they exploded across his shirt like a machine gun, proving him the victim.” (The poem ends with the delightfully insouciant, “For me the day was endlessly long. But I was thankful nothing really had gone wrong.”)

Award-winning work

Born in Illinois, educated in California and a resident of Litchfield County for decades, Kinsolving — who loves Connecticut’s architecture, history, and politics — is that rare and wonderful creature: a successful poet. 

One of her previous books, “Dailies and Rushes,” was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and in 2009 she won the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poetry Award. She taught at several universities and graduate schools as well as a men’s prison, and is also a noted librettist.

She has been instructor in English and Poet in Residence at Hotchkiss since 2009. Sitting on the breezy back porch of the shady, shuttered cottage she shares with husband William Kinsolving (a novelist, screenwriter, actor and singer touted locally for his uncanny portrayal of Walt Whitman), she confesses she has no plans to leave. 

“I want to be the Ruth Bader Ginsburg of Hotchkiss!”

Explorations

 Though it may not seem obvious, research can be a catalyst for some of the best poetry, she explains, something learned from poet and literary critic Richard Howard, a friend and mentor, who taught her to find something of interest and keep exploring it. 

“You don’t research a poem, you research a subject. And out of the subject often comes the gift of imagery, simile, fact, language — especially language,” she said. “It’s something I often to try to teach students, that out in the world there is so much we don’t know. But if you investigate, you will find extraordinary imagery and language. You find extraordinary words. 

“I never knew the word ‘sclera’ before,” she added. “I didn’t know that was the white of the eye. And I had never thought about its shape or color.”

It can be bluish, it turns out, or yellow or even grayish, depending on one’s health. Perhaps, for an expert ocularist, matching the color and shape of a missing eye is exactly like writing a poem.

Susan Kinsolving is giving her first public reading of “Peripheral Vision” at The White Hart on Thursday, June 20, at 6 p.m. On Sunday, June 23, at 2 p.m., she will read at the Gunn Memorial Library in Washington. On Friday, Aug. 2, she is scheduled to appear at the 23rd annual Sharon Summer Book Signing at the Hotchkiss Library of Sharon.