WILLIAM D. MUNDELL
By Don McLean, Cooper Hill Books, South Newfane
In last week's
column, I lamented the passing of Vermont Poet Laureate, William D. Mundell, on
Christmas Eve in South Newfane. I also expressed gratitude that he had
completed work on the last of his 6 books of poetry, which has now been
posthumously published as The Fun of Hollerin'.
As the title
suggests, Mundell has chosen primarily from his lighter pieces. Like many
artists, Mundell worked a number of different veins. Co-existing with his
intense and masterful "serious" poems is a wholly separate body of
work whose obvious ancestors are the prose-poems of Vermont's Walter Hard.
These are well-crafted sketches of life in a Vermont hill town, a subject the
poet knew intimately.
The title poem,
for example, involves a farmer's wife, Addie, whose "new" neighbor's
car is stuck in the mud. The farmer's team could pull him out, but he's mowing
a high pasture and fails to respond to Addie's shouting and waving: "She
kept right on shouting until the neighbor despaired. 'No, he ain't going to
hear us from here!', she said. 'But we did have the fun of hollerin'!' "
This poem is not
merely lifted from Mundell's third book. Rather, it is a revised version,
slightly trimmed and with different line breaks, As it turns out, many of the
revisited poems have undergone similar changes. The marvelous "In Rural
Maze", from the first book, appears re-titled "Farming Ants,"
presumably chosen to more immediately convey the subject matter. The earlier
version was cast in three solid blocks of type, each line capitalized as in
poetry of old. The revision intelligently divides each of the poem's 6 long
sentences into separate stanzas, with caps only at the beginning of each, a
great service to the reader's eye.
Similarly,
another Mundell masterpiece, "The Uninvited," profits in its revision
by shortened, lower-case lines and frequent stanza breaks, despite a
typographical error which has sneaked in. This poem is at the core of the
Mundell canon, and tells us that we humans can never enter the forest
unnoticed; our presence is "watched by snails with horns / and ants with
wings. You are tripped by little things -- / a spider's web that rings / a
hundred leaf bells down their trails..."
As in most of his
books, Mundell has divided the poems into titled categories:
"Happenings," "Transitions" and so forth. In another, and
welcome, departure, in this book he has added little summaries under each
heading, briefly describing the subject matter of the poems to follow. Again,
we sense the poet's possible premonition and a desire to comment on the work,
just in case he should be suddenly absent.
Because this book
contains the poet's own selection from his previous ones, it serves as an
excellent introduction to William Mundell, and its timely appearance is
welcome. Along with the earlier books, it is available at Brooks Library, and,
even though some of the others are technically out of print, they may be
ordered from Cooper Hill Books in South Newfane.
Particularly
recommended are the first two volumes, Hill Journey and Plowman's Earth, which
contain many of the essential masterpieces. William Mundell and Dylan Thomas
were born within a few months of each other, though the Welsh poet lived less
than half as many years. Mundell was a great admirer of Thomas, and some of his
poems travel sympathetic paths to similar heights.
From the title
poem of Hill Journey: "I am lost above orchard and field, and leaves like
apples/ Shaken by the wand of my hand fall to a carpet of light. / I make songs
out of the notes of ripe berries;/ I sit at the hallowed tables of unharvested
stumps/ And drink from the earthen cup of the blue-sky spring...." The
poem ends with a compelling summation of Mundell's dual career as citizen and
poet: "I shall go down again to the valley of concern. / I shall return to
the rage of change. / But it is today that is forever and forever, / And I can
hold the sun and the moment still / In the wink of my eyes."
Don McLean is a
poetry afficiando and composer; among his 9 settings of Mundell poems are a
song performed at Mundell's Poet Laureate ceremony and a choral cycle which has
been performed at the Golden Gate Festival in San Francisco and at a choral
competition in Wales.
http://www.state.vt.us/libraries/b733/brookslibrary/reviews1.htm#mundell
Prepared by Bob Dalrymple, PO Box 122, Dapto, NSW Australia 2350
eMail: bob@relativelyyours.com