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Meredith Stricker’s Tenderness Shoreis a fierce and luminous collection of poetry that explores the iconography of the Muse as a wilderness retreat for the imagination. Opening with a series of exchanges with Sappho — Plato’s “tenth muse” — in letters, shopping lists, postcards, choreography, and maps, then delving into the landscape of Lesbos using a lexicon to track the roots and impulses of the lyric, the collection closes with encounters among a chorus of muses: Sappho, Camus, Piaf, and birds speaking in Hungarian.
Tenderness Shore affirms that the Muse, or the human capacity to muse, can be found in any part of life — nature, photographs, art, memory — that resists being measured in terms of profit and loss. Why are there nine muses instead of one? The poet responds, “music from many / can be lost and found at the same time.”
The theme is forgiveness, the theme is justice
(deferred, delayed, obtained). The theme is rejoicing
alternating with suffering (watercourse, torrent)
Harrowing the fields. Beauty (bound to a thing, entangled)
Making compassion possible
The lyre, lyric (our thirst — zijos). To frighten away
(chase, reject). A thicket of reeds (donakeus)
Kindling a fire
What moves through the human body
Before and after the discovery of electricity.
Excerpted from “pleiades choreographic” published in Tenderness Shore by Meredith Stricker. Copyright ©2003 by Meredith Stricker. All rights reserved.
Meredith Stricker is the author of Alphabet Theater, a collection of performance poetry and visual art. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Conjunctions, chain, Five Fingers Review, Iowa Review, and Epoch. She is a partner in an architecture and art studio on California’s central coast, where she is developing the Center for Visual Poetry.
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