THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 19, 1995 TAG: 9502160338
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 88 lines
INEVITABLY, poets are teachers. From them we learn to see and hear. Sometimes, if we let them, they can even teach us to touch.
And it prickles.
We reach for that word,
the right one,
the one that will push
back the waters
and lay bare.
Poet Sharon Weinstein is a teacher by profession. Having earned a doctorate at the University of Utah and an endowed chair at Hampton University, she is a professor of English and creative writing at Norfolk State University. Weinstein also teaches classical piano.
Same lesson:
How to sit
before what you love
and make it sing.
Weinstein's first volume of verse, Celebrating Absences (Road Publishers, 94 pp., $10.95), is a crash course in compression. She won't waste words. Here's Weinstein, divorced, on ``Marriage'':
He studies his plate.
She studies him.
That's the entire poem. It's sufficient. The verse makes its needle point in perfect miniature.
``Poetry,'' says Weinstein, ``is a public utterance of a private truth.''
Such sharing implies confessional nerve. Weinstein has the guts to risk rejection. She confides in strangers.
When I write,
I take off my clothes.
I plan it that way
But I'm still exposed.
Weinstein has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Mellon Humanities Project. Her work has been published, among other places, in Western Humanities Review, the National Jewish Post and Aethlon: The Journal of Sports Literature. Poems have a way of happening to her.
``Most of them actually demanded to be written,'' Weinstein says of the 69 collected in Celebrating Absences. ``Often I was busy with something else - schoolwork, research, other writing - but they insisted on being born.''
Like stubborn kids.
I couldn't give
He couldn't receive:
That was our marriage.
Her difficult daughter resides in this volume. Her difficult students. Us.
They do not write
they do not read
they do not hand
in assignments.
But we pay close attention in class. Sharon Weinstein says I feel, therefore I am. We are all alike in that.
Some of us seek the mature sense of humor and balance implicit in ``On Turning Fifty'':
Actually,
I have stopped
turning;
arrived
somewhere
in a place
I recognize
as mine,
I shape
my mouth
in an O
of welcome
and surprise
and swallow
fifty,
whole. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Sharon Weinstein's first book of poetry is ``Celebrating
Absences.''
by CNB