“How terrible the need for God.”

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“Reason? That dreary shed, that hutch for grubby schoolboys.”

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“I wish I could find an event that meant as much as simple seeing.”

THEODORE ROETHKE

I was given a volume of The Collected Poems of the American poet Theodore Roethke when I was 17: it was sent to me from a young girl whom I adored, who’d recently moved back to The United States. I still have the much cherished, dog-eared book with it’s now flax-coloured pages and pencil underlining on my shelf. At once introspective and a celebration of nature, his poems have been my close friends through the years. Some are opaque, like dark pools of water, yet peering into them one can delight in the rhythm of the words, their sound and form simply for the pleasure they bring. Here an intellectual comprehension may be less useful than a visceral response to his poems. I think he would forgive me for comprehending his poems with my heart rather than my mind (“Reason? That dreary shed, that hutch for grubby schoolboys.”).

Often a single verse, a few poignant words have left me breathless. His poetry is whimsical and deep, playful, powerful, mystical. His work is a fissure in a rock or a clearing in the woods; an unexpected opening through which he invites us to look, and to listen. Roethke had the ability “to perceive reality in terms of the tensions between inner and outer worlds, and to find a meaningful system of metaphor with which to communicate this perception” (Karl Malkoff of The Sewanee Review).