Audrey Wurdemann (1911–1960)

An easily read collection of poetry that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1934. I had come across Audrey Wurdemann while researching a posting for the Pepys Diary at Reading for Pleasure, and the sample poems I read at Poetry Foundation intrigued me.

A couple of poems that I loved in this collection:

The Word

A thin little bitterness,
Edged like a sword,
Slid in between them
After a word.

It was none of their making.
They hardly knew
How the knife’s acid
Ever etched through.

Now they walk carefully,
Each to his own,
And their lean sharp silence
Walls them in stone.

I knew, from personal experience, exactly what that wall of stone felt like, and I believe Wurdemann has captured perfectly what it is to let a word lie between you until your friendship dissolves. I particularly liked the “now they walk carefully” because that is what happens so often, people become afraid to speak or show their feelings and they tread so lightly that they lose connection.

And, this except from a longer poem, For Eros

Years are too eager for us; years have taken
Whatever shreds of valour the birth-pains left,
And we have forgotten the fire and the ice forsaken,
And we cannot remember of what we are bereft.
O you birds who call and cry in the thickets and thorn,
Tell us the way to that world from which we were born.
… (meer)