SPIRES, Elizabeth (Kay)

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Nationality: American. Born: Lancaster, Ohio, 28 May 1952. Education: Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, 1970–74, B.A. 1974; Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, 1978–79,M.A. 1979. Family: Married novelist Madison Smartt Bell in 1985; one daughter. Career: Visiting assistant professor, Washington College, Chestertown, Maryland, 1981; freelance writer, Columbus, Ohio, and Baltimore, Maryland, 1977–80; writer-in-residence, Loyola College, Baltimore, Maryland, 1981–82. Professor of English, 1982–86, 1988–97, and since 1996 chair for distinguished achievement, Goucher College, Towson, Maryland. Awards: National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1981, 1992; Amy Lowell Traveling scholarship, 1986; Sara Teasdale Poetry award, 1990; Guggenheim fellowship, 1992; Whiting Writers award, 1996; Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry, American Academy of Art & Letters, 1998; Maryland Library Association Author award, 1998. Member, Academy of American Poets. Agent: Jane Gelfman, Gelfman Schneider Literary Agents, Inc., 250 West 57th Street, New York, New York 10107, U.S.A. Address: 6208 Pinehurst Road, Baltimore, Maryland 21212, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Globe. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1981.

Swan's Island. New York, Holt, 1985.

Annonciade. New York, Viking, 1989.

Worldling. New York, Norton, 1995.

Other

With One White Wing (for children). New York, Margaret K. McElderry Books/Simon and Schuster, 1995.

The Mouse of Amherst (for children). New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998.

Riddle Road (for children). New York, Margaret K. McElderry Books/Simon and Schuster, 1999.

Editor, The Instance of Knowing: The Occasional Prose of Josephine Jacobsen. Ann Arbor, Michigan, University of Michigan Press, 1997.

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Critical Studies: "Post-American Style" by Tony Whedon, in The Iowa Review (Iowa City), 23(1), 1993; in Partisan Review (New York), fall 1994; interview in Southwest Review (Dallas), winter 1995, and profile in Ploughshares (Boston), winter, 1999–2000, both by A.V. Christie.

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Supple free verse shapes Elizabeth Spires's quietly remarkable poetry, on occasion its lines judiciously tapped into place by rhyme and meter. There are several directions in the movement of her work. In one, life for the poet comes to position itself more and more consciously within "the shaded porch of generation, / big enough for everyone," as her account of identity moves from childhood to parenthood and gains a broader and historically colored perspective. In another lost love bends in transit from bitterness and pain into knowledge and from there into a conjugal haven. The painful loss of a lover and separation from a son through divorce are balanced thematically in poems about consolidation with a new partner, aided by the birth of a daughter. Finally, the poetry juggles the tension between the longing for heaven and the longing for reconciliation with death in the way only a lapsed Roman Catholic appears to know the ineradicable stir of these longings. All three strands can be seen in both the early and late work as Spires pulls the fabric of her poetry firmly and authoritatively beyond the prosaic and into the true territory of the lyric, into myth and fable.

Consciously or unconsciously, this ambitious and comprehensive design plays out within a consistently developing imagery. The mirrors and lights of a boardwalk, a fun house show, and the prostitutes of the photographer Bellocq's Storyville all learn to coexist with the mirrors, bells, and monasteries of a later preoccupation, as the colorful objects of public spectacle, a pervasive interest, turn increasingly inward and, one might say, upward. Choice, or rather choosing as a consequence of what the self sees imaginatively, makes an early appearance, as in the concluding lines from "Mirrors." Even in the heat of love the representations we make to others are always, perhaps only, representations we make to ourselves:

When you bend over me, asking
why I cried out, I see
my face in your eyes, the jetty's
yellow beacon flashing
a warning on the walls around us.
Any promises we make
will be promises to ourselves.

In later poems the mirroring of self and other becomes increasingly complex. While the lines quoted above point to the ways in which even loving selves remain isolated, later poems affirm and fissure that loving dialectic as both expansion and suffocation. In other exercises of reflection and split consciousness there are poems that explore mirroring indirectly through the device of the dramatic monologue. In "The Comb and The Mirror" the mermaid speaker reports on love's spell in which "self gives back the self / in love's unreflecting mirror," but the angle of her attraction is a fatal embrace. In other mirrors women, like those in "Storyville Portraits," helplessly see themselves contracting:

...Who reflects who?
thinks the woman in the mirror,
her life narrowing before her,
a series of identical rooms,
each smaller than the one before,
so that she grows smaller and more terrified

In still other poems implied mirrors are ubiquitous—the shield of children's bodies reflecting the sun, the poet's face swimming in the tea plate she holds, and so on. Mirrors in lakes and seas also bind us to a material nature reflecting back a material selfhood, while other mirrors refract family likeness, sister to sister, or an older self—one's own or one's daughter's—back to a younger self.

In "The Travellers" and in poems like "Waving Goodbye" and "Stonington Self-Portrait" the doubled and dissolving self of the mirror watcher extends to other connecting meditations. In these the pairing is not only that of the self and watcher but also Spires's characterization of time, in which the present reflects the past or future. A "now" peels back to a "then," and a long ago shades a present that is relentlessly other, often some inexplicable relative of the dead but changeless.

Mysteriously, what the gaze dwells on frequently becomes something else, an interior image, an alter ego. An example is the heron/angel in "Two Watchers" who echoes the mysterious heron self seen in the earlier "Patchy Fog," who with "hungering heron eye" waits

		until the morning's
curtain parts and shafts of sunlight make
the heron cry, cry out, to see itself defined,
bright burning outline in sky's water, and beat
its wings and fly, smoke into smoke, toward heaven,
mind that masterminds the pond's closed circle.

Reflection, which has been a basic figure from Annonciade onward, moves to become transformation.

This does not happen with anything approaching an angelic certainty, however, as the heaven toward which the heron directs his flight clouds over intermittently. In Annonciade Spires mixes prose and poetry in a piece called "Falling Away," the name for the experience of lapsed religious belief. The work returns in memory to a classroom in which "the crucifix above the front blackboard [hangs] in a face-off with the big round clock on the back wall." At age eleven the speaker's task is to imagine heaven and hell and to measure eternity. In the clock of her own time, in a recurring nightmare, the speaker returns "in my adult mind and body among children" still trying to master the earlier lesson: "Standing in the dark hallway, I'm thinking how I'll finally see through the keyhole into that polarized world of good and evil, guilt and absolution, that even a fallen-away Catholic can't escape. After all I have all time. Have all eternity."

True to this project, sensing the presence of the transcendent and faithful to its definitions, Spires's poems attempt to see behind the mirror into the object's real weightiness, beneath its skin, and over the horizon into those other layers of being. Whether the layers are celestial or simply other is not a question that can be safely answered. But a generous risk taking is in this poet's nature. The final poem of her book Worldling does not hesitate for a moment to invoke a larger, more visionary economy. Reading a parable about human mutability to her daughter at night, she says,

Our only paradise is here,
and we are rich as misers, rich in change!
We hold in our empty hands a currency of days
that we must spend down to the very last,
no holding back allowed. But sleep now.
And I'll sleep, too, to wake with you,
wake to the everlasting present of our life.

—Lorrie Goldensohn