No Doubt the Nameless
Sydney Lea
No Doubt the Nameless delves the depths of elegy, yet moves at last into as positive a reading as Sydney Lea’s poems have ever shown of the human situation. Here are familiar rural characters, whose sturdiness and joy figure as strongly into Lea’s narratives, both overt and implied, as do their trials and misfortunes.
from “Milton’s Satan,” from No Doubt the Nameless:
…The nest was empty. Burned. The ceiling
of her room still showed its poster for Some Like It Hot,
shriveling after long years
when Monroe looked down on a herd of plush deer
and other mild creatures
now ragged with age. I imagined imagination
might cool my soul: I wrestled to mind
a gentled meadow dotted with flowers,
the checkered shade of a hardwood stand in fall,
a small brook’s ice-jeweled pools,
and last, an unmarred quilt of snow
on our cellar bulkhead….
