Chilly fall morning, the deck rimed with frost. Warm and serene at the kitchen table in the early hours of the day. Buddy’s outside, bright yellow ball closely guarded at his side, erect and alert, nose twitching – sniffing, sniffing something interesting in the air.
The sky ribboned in pale blue, rose and the faintest tinge of yellow. The dun colored field meets the horizon. Bare branches – brown and bleak implore the sky. A hawk soars silently and circles – red tail proudly splayed. All’s secure and still below.
Espresso’s bubbling on the gas range, the familiar scent of morning coffee wafting in the air. The toaster oven dings. A small feast awaits – bread, crisp and lightly browned, topped with a pat of butter and apricot jam.
Bervin and Werner avoid the pitfalls of earlier editors and refuse to interpret Dickinson’s work. Instead, they let the manuscripts speak for themselves and in the process make visceral the spatial interplay between Dickinson’s words and her materials.
The result is a collection of scrap paper that says more about the Belle of Amherst than most biographies could. The madcap pencil strokes, torn edges, and higgledy-piggledy line breaks are the work of a quick-thinking, passionate woman. But the carefully crossed through and reworked prose are the mark of a poet bent on perfection. The harmony between the content and use of space, most of all, reveals Dickinson’s self-awareness and inherent knack for poetic construction. One small triangle of paper reads, with the words forming an upside down pyramid, “In this short life/ that only lasts an hour/ merely/ How much — how/ little — is/ within our/ power.” That self-important word, “power,” is smirkingly wedged between a smudge and a tear. On another little rectangle, Dickinson merely wrote, “A Mir/ acle for/ all.” And on an envelope whose face bears a carefully calligraphed “Miss Emily Dickinson” and whose rear is covered with a more elaborate poem, Dickinson has gently pencilled, “To light, and/ then return —”.
The Noah Project 