Notes on a Lost Poet

Rachel Sherwood Died at 25, Leaving Behind a Slim Volume of Powerful Poetry that Deserves a New Audience.

I posted this to a now dormant tumblr several years ago after I happened upon Rachel Sherwood’s poems on Poets.org. I’ve since reached out to her friend and literary executor David Trinidad, who kindly passed along a pdf of Mysteries of Afternoon and Evening, her lone book. This is a short essay, a first impression. A longer essay is brewing.

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Discovering Rachel Sherwood

She was barely 25 when she died, author of stray poems published in small journals, and like too many great poets, her Work faded to memory. Reading Rachel Sherwood today on the Poetry Foundation website (her lone book is out of print and difficult to find), I marvel at her control of language and grasp of detail. Marvel at the power of her fragmentary poems. At a voice surprisingly mature for such a young writer.

There is pain. A poem like “The Usual” reeks of it, opening with a conversational declaration  — “This is what it's like” — before shifting into second person and, without narrative, dropping the emotional hammer.

you sit in the white room

singular, knees together

arms over your head

Helpless. Prone. Arms in a protective position. Three lines. Nothing wasted. The speaker, in her vulnerability, is disconnected from truth. Trust has been erased. She guards herself against “the noise from the radio,” calling it “false as a drunk's promise / to loan you his car next week.” It’s a nod to a seamier, unreliable world — and she refuses to flinch. “Of course,” she says, echoing the first line’s straightforward declaration, making it clear she’s seen all of this before, “next week never comes / lies continue, nobody disbelieves them / but some are ready for the real story.” The exclusion of punctuation forces it all to run together, while also slowing the pace.

The real story is that “the young man involved breaks her tired heart.” Tired. Resigned: “it's the usual: spilt liquor, / broken dishes, wrecked cars.”

The title poem of her lone collection, “Mysteries of Afternoon and Evening,” relies on some of the same techniques: opening declaration, an accumulation of small details. And like all of her work (There are a dozen poems by Sherwood at the Poetry Foundation website), the word choices are made with purpose. A “fitful” wind, so ominous, does its damage: “soot piles in the corners / of new buildings. It is “soot,” the burned residue of energy, and not just “dirt”; and it is “new buildings,” indicating that even the gleaming edifices of progress are to be sullied. Even the gulls — an ocean bird — are victimized. They “stumble out of place” — not walk — and are joined children who “watch, breathless” and “feel an emanation / from this shuddering place.”

There is a sense of magic within all of this. A winter sky that “cracks with cardinal color,” a “wonder”that causes the speaker and her companion to coo “like dwarves at the Venetian court / must have done — / amazed at Tiepolo's sunshot ceilings.”

This is where the poem resides, in “fickle” wonder, in an acknowledged “smaller inconstancy.” Change. Uncertainty. “But,” she says, “the dazzle above, enclosing / seems fit or made for this / fragment of belief.”

Sherwood was writing 40 years ago, but her work feels contemporary, a comment on the current moment. Perhaps, we have not advanced as much as we seem to think, despite out cell phones and gadgets. We still witness the cruelties man imposes on man. We still suffer the greed and vanities of fools who think they are — we are — somehow exempt from the wind’s fitful power.

At our best, we acknowledge, we sit amazed, by the mysteries. At our worst, we allow the meanness to overtake us. Both are present, always.

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I came across Rachel Sherwood’s Work for the first time earlier this week as I was catching up on some podcasts. I was immediately struck by her poem, “The Usual,” and looked her up on the Poetry Foundation website. I’d wondered how her Work escaped me — the poems were as real as anything I’ve come across.

The story, at least what there is of it, is sad and can seem typical of the arts. A great talent begins her emergence, but tragedy strikes and the talent is lost. Sherwood died in a car crash in 1979 at the age of 25.

She had

attended St. David’s University College in Wales and California State University Northridge, where she cofounded the literary journal Angel’s Flight and where her poem ‘Mysteries of Afternoon and Evening’ won the Academy of American Poets prize. She also worked on the editorial staffs of 1822 and The Wallace Stevens Journal.

She had published poems in Angel’s Flight, Beyond Baroque, and Foreign Exchange, and had given several poetry readings in the Los Angeles area. To preserve Sherwood’s memory, her friends established the Rachel Sherwood Poetry Prize at Northridge; the award is given annually to a student poet. David Trinidad also created Sherwood Press in her honor and published (in collaboration with Greg Boyd’s Yarmouth Press) a book of Rachel Sherwood’s poems, Mysteries of Afternoon and Evening (1981).

This is from the Poetry Foundation website and leaves out her cause of death (found on Wikipedia, not the most reliable of sources). It’s unclear why, but poetry.org can’t be faulted. They host a dozen of her poems on their site, which amounts to a necessary act of preservation. Her book, Mysteries of Afternoon and Evening,  was published in 1981 by Sherwood Press and Yarmouth Press, but is out of print. But for the Poetry Foundation — and her friend David Trinidad — she’d be completely lost to us.