The Sum of Us, Poems by Women Who Write: Ella Eytan, Melanie Maier, Angelika Quirk, Laurel Feigenbaum, Gabrielle Rilleau

In The Sum of Us, five women write with authoritative voices about love and loss, natural orders, and interior landscapes--past, present, and future. This quintet sings with individually recognizable voices, but blends in a harmonious chorus to underscore how powerful mature women's voices can be. The poems are well crafted and emotionally accessible, the goal of the kind of lyrical narrative poetry I enjoy. I include below a representative sample of each poet's work.

Ella Eytan

Among poems with lines such as "I can never / love you enough" ("Love Poem"), "Ah, love, / when I lift / your hand like this / and kiss each finger / that loves me so well, / I want to tell / them with my tongue / and teeth / how I love their feel" ("Your Hands"), and "...like the inside of all women--the flesh exposed, an / offering. I see how men love us, we are so open and real" ("Tomato"), lies this striking poem exposing multiple interior layers of selfhood available for discovery through spot-on metaphors:

     Possession

     I am fresh-tossed hay,
     steam rising
     from the flanks of cows
     on a cold day.
     I'm the salt lick
     at the pastures edge,
     the tongue that hollows it.

     I am translucent
     as the snail,
     belly muscles rippling
     as I row across a lit window.

     I am many chambered--
     a nautilus. Your hand
     could span my sensuous curve.
     Lift me to your ear,
     there is the sea in me.
     Can you hear?

     Vast, that ocean--
     sudden winds, storms.
     It is inevitable--
     the night's first hint of light,
     then that pencil line
     of trouble
     before the dawn.

Laurel Feigenbaum

In addition to compelling poems about family and the natural world, Feigenbaum writes about musicians and composers from "Ol' Blue Eyes" to "Tommy Dorsey," as well as Hollywood stars like Ava Gardner. "Words and Music" is my favorite and seems emblematic of both Feigenbaum's interests and poetic style:

     Words and Music

     If this were a practice life--

     In the next
     I'd croon and scat like Ella
     Get down and dirty with Etta
     Glide across the floor with Fred or Gene
     Improvise with Basie
     Score like Sondheim or Hammerstein.

     In my spare time
     I'd cultivate a garden
     Be fluent in Spanish
     Make souffles like Julia
     Lounge, putter, fritter,
     Bask.

     Like peanut butter
     Have a big brother
     Add a lover.

Melanie Maier 

Maier's poems are highly imagistic and the short lines that populate most of them accentuate those images by leaving very little connective tissue between them. This concision makes for poems of high concentration. My favorite is "Birding." It works well on the page and read aloud, the intensity of its language enacting the brilliance of the birds that inhabit the poem, leading up to a terrific closing image.

     Birding

     Desert heat rises.
     A binoculared couple
     sights the roadrunner,
     lizard dangling from its beak.
     A copper-colored hawk
     puffs its feathers
     and looks down at them
     from the telephone pole.

     They walk . . . stop . . . walk . . .
     pause to rest under sycamore.
     A vermillion flycatcher
     flashes its brilliant chest
     at his drab mate.
     On the fence white-winged doves
     from Mexico: they stop
     in Tucson to breed.

     One egg lies broken on the path.
     Ants swarm the spilled yolk.

Angelika Quirk

In contrast to Maier's short lines, Quirk's longer lines are appropriate for her poems containing a more narrative element. They still retain, however, moments of lyricism and musicality as evidenced in my favorite, "To Die, to Live"

     To Die, to Live

     Along white corridors, the smell of disinfectant, iodine,
     I push his wheelchair down the ramp for the last time,
     away form tubal attachments and ticking monitors,
     and nurses in scrubs like floating ghosts with stethoscopes
     checking his pulse, his breath, his heart. No machines,
     no monitors could measure his will to die, to live.
     When Father Murphy came to anoint the sick, he gave
     my husband not the last rites, but the Holy Eucharist.

     My father chose to live, to survive seven years in Lager 4736
     somewhere in Russia. He listened to ravens pecking
     on white birch: Morse code from his home in Hamburg.
     And we lit candles on windowsills.

     After a bout of cancer Tante Helga gave away her possessions:
     her clothes to the Salvation Army, her memories to her cousin,
     her songs to nobody but the wind. She refused to eat,
     praying for her soul to leave the body. She believed
     in the Karmic cycle, in cause and effect after the wishing bone
     no longer split. At the very end she handed me her ruby ring,
     red as the blood drop from her mouth when she died.

     He says he wants an orange. I pick the largest from our tree,
     carry it into the house like the sun after a dreary day.
     He sucks on it, inhales the scent, the light:
     the promise of another day, another night.

Gabrielle Rilleau

Rilleau not only adds her voice to the many love poems, nature poems, and poems about family already estabished in this volume, she finds a distinctive voice when she writes about retail. This is my favorite for its familiar yet interesting names of places, as well as its music. I'm also a sucker for retail poems, as I was in retail for half my life.

     First Jobs

     When I find myself
     in Walgreen's, CVS, or Longs,
     the smell of stale popcorn and cheap cosmetics
     instantly throws me back half a century
     to age twenty, Boston, Boyston Street, to J.J. Newberry's
     serving vanilla cokes
     and to St. Johnsbury, VT, to Ames Discount Department Store
     ringing up $3.00 ladies' shoes and men's $4.57 pants.

     In those days I walked a tightrope in fear
     of being pulled down a road
     where polyester slacks and plastic flowers were my destiny,
     a road my parents had done their best to steer us from,
     The New Yorker  and Harper's Bazaar always about,
     my father, a tailor's son, pointing out the importance
     of the French seam on a well-stitched shirt.

     Somehow I escaped.

     But those earlier years--one tentative step at a time,
     balancing that taut line along aisles
     of Whitman's Chocolates, bundles of packaged socks,
     cans of off-brand peanuts, and bottles of blue perfume--
     left their mark.

Each of these poems have left their delightful mark on me. And each of these poets have left their vibrant mark on the state of poetry in Marin County, California.


Ella Eytan began to keep a notebook of poems at the University of Chicago while she was earning her BA. She wrote a few poems in high school, but didn't become serious about her writing until 1980. Since then, Eytan has published two books of poetry--Haying the Far Fields: Poems on a Minnesota Childhood and After a Certain Age. She has been published in a number of journals including Seattle Review, California Quarterly, Barnabe Mountain Review, and Poet Lore.

Laurel Feigenbaum was born and raised in San Francisco and later lived in Beverly Hills. She holds a BA in English Literature from UC Berkeley and an MA in Educational Research and Psychology from San Francisco State University. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including Nimrod, Highland Park Poetry Challenge, Les Femmes Folles Anthology of Women Poets, December, The Marin Poetry Center Anthology, and Voices Israel. Her first book is The Daily Absurd.

Melanie Maier was born and raised in San Francisco. She earned a BS from UC Berkeley and a JD from UC Hastings. Melanie's poetry has been published in numerous reviews including The Fourth River, phoebe, Southern California Review, and Gazette Wyborcza (Warsaw, Poland). Her three chapbooks are The Land of Us (Pudding House Press), Scattering Wind, and Night Boats. Her two full length collections (both from Conflux Press) are sticking to earth and Invention of the Moon.

Angelika Quirk was born and raised in Hamburg, Germany. At eighteen she immigrated to the United States. A dancer, a teacher, an artist, a lover of music, a collector of words in German and in English, she has written poems about people and experiences going back to her German roots. Two of her books, After Sirens and Of Ruins and Rumors, are on display at the library of the German American Heritage Museum in Washington, DC.

Gabrielle Rilleau has lived in Marin County for over fifty years. She joined the Marin Poetry Center in 1996 which she credits with awakening the sleeping poet within her. Rilleau was raised on the tip of Cape Cod, where she returns twice annually for inspiration. She has a collection of Provincetown poems close to "being born," though she says it may be a cesarean. For decades she has studied under the masterful tutelage of Tom Centolella and David St. John, as well as other bay area poets.