McPHERSON, Sandra

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Nationality: American. Born: San Jose, California, 2 August 1943. Education: Westmont College, Santa Barbara, California, 1961–63; San Jose State College, B.A. in English 1965; University of Washington, Seattle, 1965–66. Family: Married 1) Henry Carlile in 1966 (divorced 1985), one daughter; 2) Walter Pavlich in 1995. Career: Technical writer, Honeywell Inc., Seattle, 1966. Member of the faculty, Writers Workshop, University of Iowa, Iowa City, 1974–76, 1978–80, and Pacific Northwest College of Art, Oregon Writers' Workshop, Portland, 1981–85; visiting faculty member, University of California, Berkeley, 1981. Since 1985 professor of English, University of California, Davis. Also runs an antiques business. Poetry editor, Antioch Review, Yellow Springs, Ohio, 1979–81, and California Quarterly, 1985–88; founder, Swan Scythe Press, 1999. Awards: Helen Bullis prize (Poetry Northwest), 1968; Bess Hokin prize, 1972, and Oscar Blumenthal prize, 1975 (Poetry, Chicago); Ingram Merrill grant, 1972, 1984; Poetry Society of America Emily Dickinson prize, 1973; National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1974, 1980, 1985; Guggenheim fellowship, 1976; American Academy award, 1987; Eunice Tietjens Memorial prize (Poetry, Chicago), 1991. Address: 2052 Calaveras Avenue, Davis, California 95616–3021, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Elegies for the Hot Season. Bloomington, University of Indiana Press, 1970.

Radiation. New York, Ecco Press, 1973.

The Year of Our Birth. New York, Ecco Press, 1978.

Sensing. San Francisco, Meadow Press, 1980.

Patron Happiness. New York, Ecco Press, 1984.

Pheasant Flower. Missoula, Montana, Owl Creek Press, 1985.

Floralia. Portland, Oregon, Trace, 1985.

Responsibility for Blue. Denton, Texas, Trilobite Press, 1985.

At the Grave of Hazel Hall. Sweden, Maine, Ives Street Press, 1988.

Streamers. New York, Ecco Press, 1988.

Designating Duet. West Burke, Vermont, Janus Press, 1989.

The God of Indeterminacy. Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Edge Effect: Trails and Portrayals. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1996.

The Spaces between Birds: Mother/Daughter Poems 1967–1995. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1996.

Beauty in Use. West Burke, Vermont, Janus Press, 1997.

Other

Editor, Journey from Essex: Poems for John Clare. Port Townsend, Washington, Graywolf Press, 1981.

Editor, with Bill Henderson and Laura Jensen, The Pushcart Prize XIV: Best of the Small Presses, 1989–1990. Wainscott, New York, Pushcart Press, 1989.

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Critical Studies: "Let Me See That Book" by Marie Harris, in Parnassus (New York), 3(1), 1974; "Women Poets and the 'North-west School'" by Carol Jane Bangs, in Women, Women Writers, and the West, edited by L.L. Lee and Merrill Lewis, Troy, New York, Whitston, 1979; interview with Cecelia Hagen, in Northwest Review (Eugene, Oregon), 20(2–3), 1982; "The Belabored Scene, The Subtlest Detail: How Craft Affects Heat in the Poetry of Sharon Olds and Sandra McPherson" by Terri Brown-Davidson, in Hollins Critic (Hollins College, Virginia), 29(1), February 1992; "Flowery Codes: Sandra McPherson's Poetics of Gender and Naturalism" by Suzanne Matson, in Denver Quarterly, 28(2), fall 1993.

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From her first book on, Sandra McPherson has demonstrated an unusual ability to organize diverse associations and experiences into rich, complex, and deeply satisfying poems. Hers is a world in which the presence of nature—she is unusually intimate with the natural world, even for a poet—calls for an imaginative response that looks to rival the curiosities, wonders, and coincidences of natural history and taxonomy. The human presence on the planet, complicating everything by its needs and appropriations, is never ignored, but the poet, while conscious of her own human fallibility, is able to bring a kind of objectivity to her scrutiny of life that keeps her clear of sentimentality or special pleading. The reader learns to trust her: the rigor of her designs, the scope of her sympathies, the shaping power of her imagination.

One can, of course, trace influences in McPherson's work, especially those of Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop, but she is very much her own person and voice from early on. A poem like "Resigning from a Job in a Defense Industry," in her first collection, Elegies for the Hot Season, typifies her originality. It glances at the superficially exciting language of the technocratic world—"microhenries," "wee wee ductors," "blue beavers"—and then swerves to respond to the impoverished imaginations of fellow workers trying to preserve a sustaining relationship with the outside world. The speaker recalls the company talent show, with its "oils and sentiment / Thick on still lifes and seacoasts, / The brush strokes tortured as a child's / First script." The level gaze hovers here between judgment and sympathy in a way that satisfies the poem's and reader's best instincts: "Someone / Had studied driftwood; another man, / The spray of a wave, the mania / Of waters above torpedoes." The poem captures a large segment of modern American life in a confident, unfussy way. It is clear even at this youthful stage that the poet can transcend her ordinary self and achieve, through apparently effortless language, a visionary outlook that never loses its rooting in ordinary experience.

Subsequent collections have deepened and widened this command, displaying a steady growth of mastery and a consistent development of style. One can follow details of the poet's life—marriage, motherhood, eventual divorce, mental illness in a daughter, remarriage, relations with adoptive parents, and a midlife reunion with birth parents—but their function is that more or less impersonal grounding in experience mentioned above. One can also monitor the sustaining presence of the natural world, as in this fifth section of the ten-part poem "Studies in the Imaginary" from The Year of Our Birth:

A botany class comes close
where I am wandering the spongy ground around
a spring. How unlikely they will identify me,
stop and pronounce the existence of anyone
moving faster than locust or colt's foot.
But then, if I could even approach on foot
 
or with an extrovert word,
I wouldn't bow out to meditate, awkward
as that duck, green and bronze, strolling grass-spattered
through bamboo. Strangers
are so fast, no slowing you, no halting the wings
of the hummingbird.

Interesting things are being done with rhyme, sound, and form here, but it is the mystery of rhythm and encounter that is central both to the subject of the poem and the behavior of the language. The light touch and elusive control of statement might recall John Ashbery, but the expert handling of submerged drama and marshaled associations is clearly McPherson's own.

McPherson's structures can become so intricate and her associations so private that she occasionally loses her way or exhausts her reader's patience, but the time she takes with individual poems and with assembling her collections bespeaks a willingness to wait and work until she can get it right. Emotional control, Bishop's way as against Plath's, a survivor's mode, seems more and more crucial to McPherson's success. The greater the possibilities for runaway feelings, the greater the need to rein them in through understatement and exceptionally orchestration of detail. A short poem from Patron Happiness helps make the point:

EARTHSTARS. BIRTHPARENTS' HOUSE
 
Geasters. She bent down
At the dappled base of the tree
And among the brown leaves
Geasters stood up.
 
Oranges peel like these,
She said. Rinds bent back.
 
When it rains, their legs swell up
And walk.
	Stranger feet
Than mine
All those years
Outside your door.

The final stanza is charged with the emotion of a woman meeting her mother for the first time in middle age. It is powerful not only for its understatement but also for its objectified setting. Mother and daughter are not discussing their lives and feelings but rather looking together at an unusual fungus. We sense that this is no dodge. The poet's subjective interest is as firmly fixed on the wonder of a name ("geaster" means "earthstar") and on the curious shape, texture, and behavior of a mushroom most people would pass without noticing as it is on her strange reunion. The poem's implicit claim is that there is finally no difference between fact and emotion, spirit and matter. It knits the world together again before our eyes. A reader who would fully understand the poem must be willing to take the trouble to know what a geaster is, to look it up in a book or, better still, find one in the field. This poet will not encourage us to be lazy, unobservant, ignorant, or maunderingly subjective.

She has typically informed herself exhaustively about these subjects before plunging into an imaginative relationship with them that, once again, has given rise to surprising, intricate, and moving poems. No one who reads one of her quilt poems, much less the series of them, is likely to look at a quilt with the same eyes again. Her sympathy with the unsung creators of her own culture has proved to be profound and revelatory.

—David Young