Sing by the Burying Ground

Wallace Stevens aphroistically noted that “thought tends to collect in pools.” This sense of fluid, fateful, communion-seeking intellect undergirds the essays in Marianne Boruch’s Sing by the Burying Ground.

Here, the storied septuagenarian reflects on a lifetime of living in fellowship with verse. We delve into one of the first poems Boruch ever loved—“I was smitten straightaway and could not not read on,” she writes—from a largely forgotten Depression-era writer. We follow her on a pilgrimage to Roethke’s hometown of Saginaw, Michigan. We are entreated to consider the case for Dorothy Wordworth (the famous William’s sister) as poetry’s first Imagist working in English—thus beating Ezra Pound to the punch.

And, of course, each essay lives under the shadow of Emily Dickinson’s unnerving remark in her April 26, 1862 letter to Thomas Higginson, editor of the Atlantic, that her fate was to “sing, as a Boy does by the Burying Ground…” However dark, Boruch suggests, that fate can be a kind of luck, too.