ORONO — When people lie awake with their thoughts, their mind often turns to how life has changed and what may come. Spinning in the dark hours, thoughts swirl with fears, hopes and reflections. People change as they pass through time. So, too, does the world they live in, their friends and their environment and the society they live in.
“The Midnight Work,” Jennifer Moxley’s eighth book of poetry, contemplates these changes as she enters and experiences midlife. Woven with nostalgia and tension, the professor of English at the University of Maine connects her immediate present and recent past through conversations with the more distant past or even the ancient world through lyrics and epistles, or letter poems.
“This book deals a lot with a contemplation of life at midlife, a little past midlife and thinking about a sort of metaphysical disquiet when looking back,” said Moxley. “There is a lot of nostalgia in this book and trying to figure out what it means to be in this world right at this moment.”
In the lyric poem “1900,” readers join Moxley and her husband on a summer expedition to a Hannaford grocery store amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. We feel the frustration, fear and tired novelty of the situation. The poem grows tendrils as Moxley reflects on her “mother’s mother,” Leola Isabel Warnock Freeman, a portrait painter based in the American southwest.
“1900” demonstrates how Moxley’s research feeds her emotive lines. A Campbell’s soup can emblazoned with a gold medallion, awarded the same year as her grandmother’s birth, leads her to lament that the internet, where she discovered that fact, knows more about her grandmother than she does. The poem continues as she considers the life of Helen Gahagan Douglas, an American actor and politician, also born in 1900; as well as Nathalie Sarraute, a Russian-born French writer born that same year. From that node of connection through time, Moxley weaves together elements of their lives and themes in their respective works.
Moxley’s navigation through midlife, both in her life and in the book, is guided in part by Horace, a Roman poet from the first century, and Tao Qian, a Chinese poet from the fourth and fifth centuries.
“When I started reading these poets around 2016-15, they just really spoke to where I was in my own life,” said Moxley. “They helped me negotiate the move into late middle age, which is a form of hell, I suppose.”
The poets interrogate what it means to live a meaningful life in their work. “Both of them land on similar answers to that question, which is not the accumulation of material goods,” said Moxley. “It’s moderation, our relationship to good friends and wine and poetry and cultivating the land. Not ambition — worldly ambition — but quiet contemplation.”
Horace’s “Epistles” also inspired Moxley to write her own, ushering in a stylistic change from the lyrical voice of her previous works. Moxley’s epistles address the living and dead, close friends and complete strangers. The writing of the epistles was not a planned process, but a reflective one. Each epistle wound through her memories of the person it was written for, and of her own life. Moxley explained that she hoped the reader would find, “Some space that opens up in their own lives for reflection and contemplation,” in the same way she did.
While there is immense value in this contemplation, Moxley also acknowledges how taxing it can be.
“Whenever you think about lost time, whenever you think about lost worlds, whenever you think about all the people you have loved who are no longer here, it’s sad,” said Moxley. “The emotional spaces that the poems put me in were sometimes very hard to recover from.”
As “The Midnight Work” debuts, Moxley is already looking forward, researching and composing her next work. She acknowledges, though, that for her readers, everything is just starting.
“I would want them to have the experience that I had when I read Horace or Tao Qian, which is to feel some space that opens up in their own lives for reflection and contemplation and existential depth,” Moxley said.
At the same time, she said there should be joy in the experience, adding that “I hope that I would bring delight in the reading of some of those moments.”
