In 2023, the debut of J.C. Scharl’s verse drama, Sonnez Les Matines, confirmed the prodigious talent of its author before appreciative New York audiences. Now, in Ponds, a collection of 49 poems, Scharl once again demonstrates her gift for evoking the humanity of both the past and the present. Whether walking alongside Abraham in the wilderness, summoning up images of Diogenes and Plato in ancient Athens, or depicting a group of children playing games outside, Scharl closes the distances of space and history with intimate expressions that touch upon our shared experiences, drawing the mind upward to consider one’s individual part in the far greater expanse of creation itself.
A close reading of all of the poems included in Scharl’s collection is obviously beyond the scope of a review. It is also challenging to collate a small but representative sample, given the varied nature of the poems on offer, which run the gamut from seven-line poetic impressions to multi-page historical soliloquies. Consequently, this review will focus on only two poems, selected not only because they are particularly striking to this reviewer but also because they are representative of the high quality of the collection.
In “The Newlywed,” a poem in ten heroic stanzas (also known as elegiac stanzas, appropriate to the poem’s setting in the underworld), Scharl reimagines the story of Hades’ abduction of Persephone from the viewpoint of Persephone herself. In her opening line, the Queen of the Underworld challenges the established stories, declaring, “The myths are wrong—it wasn’t Hades’ fault.” Here, Scharl demonstrates that she is not interested merely in adapting her mythological sources but rather that she is capable of transforming them, as the Greeks themselves did across the varying forms of the Persephone myth. The poem’s frequent enjambments, not only across lines but nearly every stanza, force the reader into pauses that impress the meaning of individual lines, as in the case of “I found them / myself one afternoon” intensifying the distinction between Persephone’s “myself” and the alienated “them”—the seeds of the pomegranate which will become the instrument of her imprisonment.
Across stanzas, the enjambments enhance the impression of Persephone’s indomitable irrepressibility: the content of her story will not be impeded by mere poetic convention. It continues, almost breathless, until she is ready to stop, a conclusion supported by the prevalence of the first-person pronoun “I” (often followed by an active verb that repeatedly establishes the speaker as the commanding subject) and lines like “No one gave me anything— / I took it.” Her disdain for Hades’ warnings, her refusal to accept convention (whether poetic or mythic), and even her rejection of traditional aesthetic values in her love for “the flat and changeless sky above, / for the scrawny bush that twisted as it grew / to bear its stunted fruit” all establish Persephone’s rebellious personality, at once entirely appropriate to its mythological origins whilst also being a new and novel creation very much situated in the twenty-first century.
Beyond the unforgettable content of “The Newlywed,” which reshapes the mythological inheritance of Persephone, the poem is replete with exceptional lines of the finest poetic calibre. Of particular interest is the transition from the sixth to the seventh stanza, which reads: “The truth is, he tried to warn me off. / He as good as said it was a trap, and / told me that land’s fruit is bitter. I laughed / at him.” Here, Persephone establishes herself as the contrary arbiter of veracity (“The truth is …”) and deftly inverts the meaning of her terminal sentence with the conclusion of an enjambment: “I laughed,” she begins, suggesting a shared joke with Hades, only to follow in the next line with “at him,” thereby making Hades an object of mockery. But these artful poetic moves only bracket the supreme “told me that land’s fruit is bitter,” employing a studied ambiguity on “that” in both its pronoun and conjunction forms. For the pronoun form, the line may be read as referring to ‘the fruit of that land’ (the underworld), and in the conjunction form, the line may just as grammatically be read to mean ‘he told me that the fruit of land (land’s fruit) is bitter’ withal. The line is thus at once both specific and general, allowing devious Hades to make an observation not only about the conditions of his own realm, but of the fallen (or rather, post-Pandoran) mortal world more generally. It is his only line in the poem, and even then only expressed through Persephone’s paraphrase, but natheless, it steals the show.
Not only because of the delightful rhyme on “That’s not what happened” and “it was a trap, and,” Scharl’s take on the Persephone myth yields a fine example of a poem worthy of being committed to memory in a modern culture obsessed, as Persephone seems to be, with its own, forceful self-actualisation: “I took that too, and bit / the skin to break it, and with my fingers split / it wide and pried those seeds out, one by one.” Here, the critique is implied in reflection upon Persephone’s unsettling way of telling the story, with its verbs (took, bit, break, split, pried) that more than suggest a transference of violence connected to the narcissist, to the individual too keen to play the part of being an individual.
It is a struggle to turn the page on “The Newlywed,” for a thorough reading could rapidly account for the full content of this review, so extensive are this reviewer’s notes across its mere forty lines. It must suffice instead to conclude by noting a small modification that Scharl makes to the myth, almost in passing. According to the classical sources, Persephone’s time in the underworld, and its deleterious effect on the climate of the world above, was dictated by how many pomegranate seeds she ate whilst sojourning in Hades’ realm: three seeds in the early versions of the tale (thus accounting for the three months of winter), and half of the seeds in the later versions of the tale (thereby accounting for autumn and winter—half the year). But Scharl, who lives in Detroit, knows the truth of things: her Persephone consumes three-fifths of the seeds on offer, ensuring a longer, Michigan-length period of wintry misery.
The other poem under examination in this review is “Icon of Elijah in the Wilderness,” which, despite its name, is set in the modern world of televisions and automobiles. Unlike the formal, heroic stanzas of “The Newlywed,” the lines here are irregular, although there is a strong rhythmic nature which builds here and there across multiple lines (e.g., lines 17–24) before fading away, like the sound of the “cars on the distant / freeway”:
Evening creeps up
and purples the world
so sound and perspective
bend round on themselves
and cars on the distant
freeway seem as close
as the lovebirds chattering
in the palm fronds overhead.
Here, a rhythmic pattern begins to emerge even as the poem calls attention to “sound and perspective,” but the pattern fades away just as quickly as the focus shifts to the lovebirds and then to the palm fronds which conceal them, at once obscuring the reader’s metaphorical view and the metrical identification.
In this poem, a boy in a treehouse is metaphorically imagined as a hermit in a cave—but this perspective shifts, as the quoted lines above suggest. “The little hermit” is robed not in an ascetic’s garb, but in a blue t-shirt; and he looks out not on the sea or a desert wasteland, but on the “darkening street” with its “voices, music, / neon of televisions.” Despite these modern images, the language of the poem insists that his dwelling remains a “grotto” and a “cave” and that he remains a “hermit,” thereby separating him from the modern world, which fills the rest of the poem—a poetic act which mirrors the hermetic act of separation. The boy-hermit is in the world, but not of it, so that when “Someone / calls from a back door, outlined / against flashes from a screen,” the boy does not stir, for “in the cave set high / in the grapefruit tree, all is still.” The world of modernity may not intrude upon the silence of the hermit’s abode. Moreover, a reasonable conjecture is that the “someone” may be a parent, calling the boy-hermit back to the world, keen to provide for him with an evening meal. Instead, the birds flutter about the grapefruit tree, “and by the movement / of their wings knock fruit, / sun-warmed, to roll on the floor / up to his quiet feet,” thereby echoing the tales of saintly hermits and ascetics whose sustenance came through a natural world that is moved by God.
Silence is what occasions the hermit’s hideaway; it seems not only to be the condition of his retreat from modernity but the very means by which that retreat is enacted. And it is essential that the retreat is natural—or rather, it may be better to say that silence is natural, and therefore so is the retreat, hence its constant inclination to focus on elements of the natural, rather than the man-made, world: birds, foliage, and the fruit which sustains and encircles the poem: the second line announces the setting of the grapefruit tree, and the final lines describe the fall of the fruit.
It is noisy ‘reality,’ with its intrusive insistence on being heard and acknowledged, that is the element of strangeness in the poem’s world. In an evening-touched line which faintly echoes Wallace Stevens’ “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock” (“None of them are strange … / Only, here and there, an old sailor, / Drunk and asleep in his boots, / Catches tigers / In red weather.”), Scharl’s speaker notes that “Only the noisy lit interiors / of other people’s houses / are far away and strange.” Like the “white night-gowns” that haunt the houses in Stevens’ poem, the light of screens and neon of televisions haunt the world of “Icon of Elijah in the Wilderness,” where Scharl provides her own subject with a silent retreat not unlike the sailor’s sleep. But where the “red weather” of Stevens’ poem suggests an insoluble ambiguity cantered on the nature of “ten o’clock” (a.m. or p.m.?) and what it portends for a sailor (red weather in the morning meaning the opposite of red weather in the evening), Scharl’s verse provides readers with something more stable: a commentary on the relationship between silence, nature, and modernity. And she provides her subject with something more unequivocally sustaining—presuming that the boy-hermit, like this reviewer, is deeply enamoured of fresh grapefruit.
These two poems together make up a very small portion of the overall collection, but their poetic depth and creatively generative complexity are to be found across the text. Indeed, the titular, longest, and penultimate poem in the collection, “Ponds,” subtitled, “The last words of Theoderic the Ostrogoth to his magister, Cassiodorus,” is deserving of a review entirely on its own merits. Having come down to us through history as the Arian king who had St. Boethius tortured and executed, Theoderic has earned a degree of justified odium—especially because, had he lived, he might well have instigated a pro-Arian persecution of Christians. Scharl’s poem imagines the psychology of the King of the Ostrogoths on his deathbed, whence he offers a spirited defence of his religious and military conduct to his counsellor (and critic), Cassiodorus, before dismissing him.
Scarcely indeed has this reviewer encountered so enjoyable a poetic venture as Scharl’s collection offers. Too often, it has been argued that, although there may be much beauty in contemporary poetry, there is also little impact upon readers and the canon more generally. But, if there is indeed poetic justice, then Scharl’s Ponds should buck that trend. Her novel efforts are deeply creative works of profound poetic craft, and her reimaginings of history and mythological accounts are not mere side stories or dalliances to be read and forgotten but true interpretive advancements that shape the perception of hitherto well-known characters and events. They are, in short, the very model of conservative aesthetic aspirations, at once traditional and new, connecting the past to the present and reminding us of the vibrancy and relevance of our cultural tradition in the best possible way. Theoderic and Persephone will never be the same again.
