Reading Recommendation: Lia Purpura, "All the Fierce Tethers" (New England Review 37.1)
I recommend this crystalline essay in the latest issue of the New
England Review by my Oberlin classmate Lia Purpura:
Lia’s ability to find surprising connections, to blend intellect
and imagination, and to draw her art into an engagement with the world, strike
me as qualities Oberlin would have nurtured in her. She observes locally and
thinks globally. She appreciates the magnificence of the minute. In her first
book of poetry, The Brighter the Veil, there are poems about mosquitos,
pennies, buttons. In my favorite, “Buttons,” she writes: “At night/each goes
back/through its own darkness./Star after star is led out.” When I first read
the poem in 1996, I was in the midst of stay-at-home fatherhood, preoccupied
with small, domestic things that in Lia’s poems became large and luminous. In
her essay, Lia writes that when she observes people “it’s exactly the
boundedness of their lives, the precise sizing down that moves me.” I think of
those lightly personified buttons. That was twenty years ago. What tiny marvels
was she contemplating at Oberlin thirty years ago? I found several of Lia’s
poems in a sepia-spined copy of The Plum Creek Review, Oberlin’s student
literary journal, from Spring 1985. Already, at 20 or 21, she was writing poems
that make you hold your breath and release it with an ah at the end. In
one poem, “Finding Out a House,” she pauses to imagine “somewhere in the
attic/a seed between floorboards.” There it is, the tiny detail that so many
others would miss.
I didn’t really know Lia at Oberlin. She was an English major,
which placed her at a level of sophistication far beyond my reach, then or now.
(It amazes me that I have friends who are actual English professors.) She was
also a creative writing major, and creative writing was the course in which I
received my lowest grade at Oberlin. Diane Vreuls actually used the word
“trash” about some of my writing. She was right. I was a good writer who needed
to find the right things to write about. Lia was a fantastic writer whose eye
and ear already seemed perfectly attuned. It astonishes me that, thirty years
later, Lia and I have both appeared in the New England Review.
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