Wellspring by Sarah Stemp

Some of the poems in this illuminating collection by Sarah Stemp are crisp, compressed mysterious utterances, “like something almost being said” as Philp Larkin might say, rather than something directly stated. Like the manifest mask a dream wears, they hint at the depths beneath the surface, the wellspring, the glorious metaphor the author exploits so compellingly. Other poems are less compressed, their energies less coiled inside them, more ready to reveal and engage with the reader directly. But all of the poems are enchanting as they investigate the essence of dreams, mythology, psychoanalysis, the puzzles of the natural world as well as the mysteries of motherhood and childhood, and of birth itself and the existentials of that lifelong afterbirth called the human condition! These poems are jolting and calming all at once, a paradox the enchanted reader must engage with and embrace. One can hear the cadences of Dickinson and Frost here and there (as well as others that Stemp cites in her notes at the end of this volume) but the authentic poetic voice is entirely author’s own.

–Eugene Mahon, training and supervising analyst Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, and author of Bone Shop of the Heart, Poems of Memory and Desire; and Such Stuff as Dreams: a psychoanalytic inquiry.

The poems in this complex, musical, beautiful collection narrate the pain, courage and glory of a woman searching for truth – the hard work, transformations, sorrows and exhilarations – a “wellspring of [her} own making” – as she rebirths herself. At times the stories threaded through the poems are clear narrative, at times language is used to refer to missing lost parts, reflected in partial sentences, incomplete phrases and layered imagery. But always in this work we read a poet who loves form. She dives deep into her own past; seeing her life in myth – the story of Athena born from her father’s mind – her mother’s power and protection never possessed but always longed for. She offers her faith and openness to the imagery and meanings unearthed from the unconscious (Stemp is a psychoanalyst as well as a poet) and as a reader I feel her empathy, finding company along the way in the tangled paths toward transformation. In “Dream Sequence” our human fears of loneliness and threatening unconscious wishes are captured in musical cadences. Indeed, Stemp’s belief that form both holds and rescues us connect all these poems as she describes her/our bodies, our minds, the ways these aspects of ourselves can never wholly be split asunder. If she is writing of nature, her love of water, of the death of her mother, or of her own motherhood – (“can the poet and the mother reconcile?” she asks) – the poems describe what can be “born” and what is so hard to be “borne.”

A trusted voice in one poem tells her, after she sings out loud, “You have a good voice.” In those words lies the simple if wildly understated truth of these poems. A powerful, knowing, important voice speaks to us in Wellspring.

–Jane Lazarre, author of The Mother Knot and Breaking Light, poems.