Everything Winged Must be Dreaming: Poems by Susan Ludvigson - Tapa dura

The poems in Susan Ludvigson's Everything Winged Must Be Dreaming turn in large measure, as the title suggests, on images of flight and wings, dreams and air. Many concern dreams or unconscious material erupting into, intersecting with, affecting, our conscious lives.
Ludvigson conveys her major recurring theme - love, sexual love, as it relates to the life of the spirit, and also to death - in an assortment of ways. "Etiam Peccata," for example, chronicles the liaison that inspired the dramatist Paul Claudel's masterpiece, Partage de Midi. Through this long poem, told from the point of view of Roza Scribor-Rylska, Claudel's lover, we witness the endurance, and finally the death, of her love, as well as Claudel's struggle to resolve the conflict between his sensuality and his spirituality. "After Love," another example, reads like a release of breath in describing a woman's flight of reason in sexual ecstasy: She remembers how reason/ escaped from the body,/ flew out with a sigh,/ went winging up/ to a corner of the ceiling/ and fluttered there,/ a moth, a translucence,/ waiting.
In other poems we are reminded that the spirit is a solitary entity. In "October in the Aude," one of many poems set in France, the poet and her husband watch hawks circling in the sky, in the mountains, and then turn to observe some men and women sprinting downhill trying to catch a gust of wind during a parachute lesson: Even such brief/ joinings with air, with absence,/ must give them a sense that the world/ can be left behind, that one can choose/ the landscape of the mind. I imagine/ their goal, small brushes with death/ made beautiful, the spirit drifting off/ where it will.
Marked by audacious couplings of thought and feeling, these are poems of comprehensive reach and unerring empathy. They add further distinction to an already remarkable poetic career.

Susan Ludvigson is professor of English and poet-in-residence at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina.