Marilyn Nelson

Marilyn Nelson was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and comes from a long line of teachers on her mother’s side. Her father was a career Air Force officer who wrote poetry and plays. Nelson grew up on air bases all over the country and wrote her first poem at age 11. She earned her B.A. from the University of California, Davis, and holds postgraduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania (M.A., 1970) and the University of Minnesota (Ph.D., 1979), and an honorary doctorate from Kutztown University in Pennsylvania.

Nelson is the author of six books of poetry, two children’s collections, and several chapbooks. Her work has also appeared in numerous anthologies and literary collections. She has been described as “a poet of stunning power, able to bring alive the most rarified and subtle of experiences.”

Her poetry books, all of which were published by the Louisiana State University Press, include: "The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems" (1997) which won the Poet’s Prize, was a finalist for the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the 1997 National Book Award, and the PEN Winship Award; "Magnificat" (1994); "The Homeplace" (1990) which won the 1992 Annisfield—Wolf Award and was a finalist for the 1991 National Book Award; "Mama’s Promises" (1985); and "For the Body" (1978).

Other honors include two Pushcart prizes, two creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship,the 1990 Connecticut Arts Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Since 1978, she has been professor of English at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. In 2001, the Connecticut Commission on the Arts named Nelson as Poet Laureate for the State of Connecticut.

 

Her most recent work, "Carver: A Life in Poems," movingly tells the story of botanist and inventor George Washington Carver in verse. Of the book, Ashley Bryan states, “Marilyn Nelson has crafted spare, singing lines that succeed in creating a biography in poems that brilliantly evoke Carver’s life.”

 

 

Mama's Promise

I have no answer to the blank inequity
of a four-year-old dying of cancer.
I saw her on TV and wept
with my mouth full of meatloaf.

I constantly flash on disasters now;
red lights shout Warning. Danger.
everywhere I look.
I buckle him in, but what if a car
with a grille like a sharkbite
roared up out of the road?
I feed him square meals,
but what if the fist of his heart
should simply fall open?
I carried him safely
as long as I could,
but now he's a runaway
on the dangerous highway.
Warning. Danger.
I've started to pray.

But the dangerous highway
curves through blue evenings
when I hold his yielding hand
and snip his minuscule nails
with my vicious-looking scissors.
I carry him around
like an egg in a spoon,
and I remember a porcelain fawn,
a best friend's trust,
my broken faith in myself.
It's not my grace that keeps me erect
as the sidewalk clatters downhill
under my rollerskate wheels.

Sometimes I lie awake
troubled by this thought:
It's not so simple to give a child birth;
you also have to give it death,
the jealous fairy's christening gift.

I've always pictured my own death
as a closed door,
a black room,
a breathless leap from the mountaintop
with time to throw out my arms, lift my head,
and see, in the instant my heart stops,
a whole galaxy of blue.
I imagined I'd forget,
in the cessation of feeling,
while the guilt of my lifetime floated away
like a nylon nightgown,
and that I'd fall into clean, fresh forgiveness.

Ah, but the death I've given away
is more mine than the one I've kept:
from my hands the poisoned apple,
from my bow the mistletoe dart.

Then I think of Mama,
her bountiful breasts.
When I was a child, I really swear,
Mama's kisses could heal.
I remember her promise,
and whisper it over my sweet son's sleep:

When you float to the bottom, child,
like a mote down a sunbeam,
you'll see me from a trillion miles away:
my eyes looking up to you,
my arms outstretched for you like night.