The older poems in All of It Singing are drawn from Linda Gregg’s collections Too Bright to See (1987), Alma (1989), The Sacraments of Desire (1992), Chosen by the Lion (1995), Things and Flesh (1999), and In the Middle Distance (2006). This collection spans a landscape of love, loss, and redemption. Beginning with poems from Too Bright to See, Gregg starts small in “We Manage Most When We Manage Small,” with an image of hair, which “falls before you./ Fragile and momentary, we continue.” In fact, the two lovers in the poem are so vulnerable and ethereal that they are only “Managing as thin light on water” and “love a little, as the mice huddle.” From this small moment, Gregg’s poetry expands.
Through personification, Gregg gives elements of nature a mythical quality, as in her depiction of the sun and the moon in “Different Not Less”: “The sun, bull-black/ and ready to return, holds back so the moon,/ delicate and sweet, may finish her progress.” In this description, the strength of the sun and the translucence of the moon interplay to create a kind of eclipse, coming close but not quite touching, like the lovers in the poem who “look into the night, or death, our loss,/ what is not given.” The speaker describes how she and her lover “see another world alive/ and our wholeness finishing.” This observation of wholeness and detachment from it is also portrayed in “Classicism,” a three-line poem describing how “The nights are very clear in Greece./ When the moon is round we see it completely/ and have no feeling.” In “Whole and Without Blessing,” this wholeness becomes a self-contained autonomy where the speaker renounces her attachment to people and announces her detachment from earthly things: “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.” Even the sun that warms her is “indifferent.” In “Safe and Beautiful” from
Alma, the moon is personified again, but this time “lying around in pretty satin,” her “hair fixed all careful like a widow,” playing “safe, safe, beautiful and safe,” as if to preserve herself from pain.
The matter-of-fact tone with which the speaker of Gregg’s poems describes her isolation continues in “Summer in a Small Town,” where the speaker explains, “When the men leave me,/ they leave me in a beautiful place.” With this acceptance comes irony, the speaker walking “back across the mown lawn/ loving the smell and the houses/ so completely it leaves my heart empty.” Perhaps it is the familiar smells and sights of summer that comfort this woman after feelings of abandonment and of being “alone no loneliness in the dream in the quiet” that is repeated like a chant in “Alma to Her Sister.” In “New York Address,” there is a marked contrast to this, with the speaker “walking three miles to get home” and wanting to die. Rather than an empty heart, she does not “seem to have a heart at all.” In “Eurydice” Gregg describes the loss after Eurydice and Orpheus have been reunited, only to be separated again forever because Orpheus looked back at her, not trusting that she was there. It is more painful for Eurydice to have had a brief glimpse of Orpheus after resigning herself to being without him: “I did not cry as much in the darkness/ as I will when we part in the dimness.” Orpheus and Eurydice reappear
in “The Ninth Dawn” from Chosen by the Lion. The gods are “willing to have/ the lovers destroyed . . . pulsing around their perishing.” This alliteration mimics the heartbeat that is threatened to be silenced because Eurydice “went too far into the woods and after/ lived with the darkness around her forever.” One can hear her voice in “The Terrifying Power of Darkness Is Inseparable from the Redemptive Power of the Sacred”: “If you do this to me, if you/ do this to me, if you take your love away, if you take,/ if you go away, you will make my heart blind in me.”
In poems from this collection, Gregg also confronts middle age, coming “prepared to answer questions, because it said there would be questions.” It is as if the speaker sees herself in “The Shopping-Bag Lady” who has a way of getting money, “Never asking. Sideways and disconcerting” or the women who are “asleep on the floor/ on pieces of cardboard.” The detachment continues with “Dry Grass & Old Color of the Fence & Smooth Hills,” where “All life is beautiful/ at a distance” from the women in a California town with their “mess and canning and babies crying.” Gregg also confronts mortality in her poems depicting the brutality that can exist in nature and relating it to humanity, as in “The Men Like Salmon,” in which she describes how “The flesh falls off like language,/ bruised and sick.” “Sick with the bones. Rotten with sorrow,” it leaves “everything good or loved behind.” This brutality continues with “The Copperhead,” where “Almost blind he takes the soft dying/ into the muscle-hole of his haunting./ The huge jaws eyeing, the raised head sliding/ Back and forth, judging the exact place of his killing.” This copperhead “knows the fastness/ of his
mouthing” but “does not see the quickness collapsing” and “does not see at all what he has done.”
In poems such as these, Gregg shows how nature is not only beautiful but unforgiving and will not hesitate to do whatever it takes to survive. This violence in nature continues in the title poem from Chosen by the Lion, where the speaker is “the one chosen by the lion at sundown/ and dragged back from the shining water./ Yanked back to the bushes and torn open, blood/ blazing at the throat and breast of me./ Taken as meat. Devoured as spirit by spirit.”
The Sacraments of Desire begins with a more celebratory tone in “Glisten,” where the speaker knows that no one is there to see her glistening when she returns “naked to the stone porch.” The “almond tree with its husks/ cracking open in the heat” contrasts the moisture that is lying on her skin. She notices how the earth is “moving slowly” as she stands there drying in the light. This appreciation of the body continues in “The Small Thing Love Is,” with the speaker describing how her body is “filled by a summer of lust” and how she “can’t tell the difference between desire,/ longing, and all the sweet speeches/ love hoards.” She marvels at “the wet couple undone/ by a power only the earth could love,” the earth perhaps represented by an unnamed woman in “All the Spring Lends Itself to Her.” The speaker entreats, “We will lie in the humming fields/ and call to Her, coaxing Her back. We will lie/ pressed close to the earth, calling Her name,/ wondering if it is Her voice we are whispering.”
Resignation and even relief for being alone reappear in this section with “Grinding the Lens.” “In the middle of my life,” the speaker says, she is “Alone and happy.” In “Singing Enough to Feel the Rain,” she is “alone writing as quickly as [she] can,/ dulled by being awake at four in the morning,/ Between the past and future, without a life.” In another reference to midlife, she is “writing on the line [she walks] between death/ and youth, between having and loss.” Perhaps she is writing poetry to capture “the voice of what has no voice,” to which she refers in “There Is No Language in This Country.” Perhaps it is also her duty to “live in the suffering and desire of what/ rises and falls. The terrible blind grinding/ of gears against our bodies and lives,” as described in “It Is the Rising I Love.”
Yet even choosing to be in a relationship is a resignation in “I Thought on His Desire for Three Days,” with the speaker explaining, “I chose this man, consciously, deliberately,/ I thought on his desire for three days/ and then said yes” despite his being married. In fact, she says, “I am here/ to tell you I did not mind.” Even when the man’s wife calls and says she is a whore, the speaker says, “I was quiet, but inside I said, ’perhaps.’” She cannot bring herself to see the relationship as tawdry, viewing herself and her lover as “innocent in purity and magnificent disorder” (“The Clapping”) and even describing how they “could have been mistaken for a married couple” in “Asking for Directions.” Perhaps she is referring to her lover’s marriage when she says, “Let the tower in your city burn” (“The Resurrection”). Yet after this operatic exhortation, the speaker calmly observes her lover’s forehead, cheek, and lips in “Winter Light.” In contrast to the brutality of nature portrayed in other poems by Gregg, nature and God become complicit when the lovers make love in a “collision that makes His face shine./ Makes the sap rise. God squeezes and relents/ like winter
ending, and the sap rising.” Nevertheless, the speaker of “A Bracelet of Bright Hair About the Bone” (a line from John Donne’s “Relic”) wants something more permanent, a material memento of the relationship, “Dirt and corpses even.” This sequence of poems ends with an exultation in “Let Birds,” where the speaker pledges to “never give up longing” and let her hair stay long. In the repetition of lines that begin with “Let,” such as “Let birds, let birds./ Let leaf be passion./ Let jaw, let teeth, let tongue be/ between us,” she opens herself to all possibilities and accepts whatever may come, including whatever repercussions she may have in this tumultuous relationship.
The poems of Things and Flesh, however, take a more modest approach, as in “Precision,” where the speaker observes, “There is a modesty in nature, where The leaf moves/ just the amount the breeze indicates/ and nothing more.” In an ironic comparison she sees this in “the power of lust, too,” where “there can be a quiet and clarity, a fusion/ of exact moments.” She describes this stillness as profound in how “There is a silence of it/ inside the thundering. And when the body swoons,/ it is because the heart knows its truth.” In yet another paradox, though, “There is a hunger for order,/ but a thirst against” (“A Thirst Against”). “The Limits of Desire” gives human form to Love, who comes along and says, “I know,/ I know. Abandoned after all/ those promises./ But I can’t help. I traffic/ in desire, passion, and lust.”
People who lose their moorings are one of Gregg’s recurrent themes, as in the woman in “Downsized” who thinks to herself, “I am less/ and less part of the world, even though/ I live closer to it than ever,” and the woman in “Hephaestus Alone,” whose “heart is like a boat that sets forth alone,/ on the ocean and goes out far from him.” Yet this feeling of aloneness is also cherished in Gregg’s poems, as in “Staying After,” where the speaker describes living “alone in a kind of luxury,” echoing Alfred Lord Tennyson’s line about it being better to have loved and lost than never loved at all when she states, “I fell in love./ I believed people.” There are no regrets in these lines, just as there are no regrets in lines that range from startlingly brutal to achingly gentle, from complete detachment to complete immersion. In describing how people connect with and are separated from each other and nature, Gregg shows how people are all essentially alone, how “Each person has a secret world” (“Getting Down”) but still feels the need to be in the world and with others.