Orient Point by Julie Sheehan

Orient Point
By Julie Sheehan
2006 W.W. Norton
135 pp

At a point in time when the term ‘contemporary poetry’ has come to mean generally poor attempts at emulating Whitman or passing off journal entries as poetry, there seems little willingness on the part of the contemporary poets to pay homage to the rich heritage of form and structure of the pre Whitman years.
Simply stated poetry is the nobility of the language, all else is prose in cheap disguise. Yet few poets are willing to move out of their ‘safety zones’ to experiment with the language and we are deluged with confessions and laundry lists passed off as poetry.
Then there is Julie Sheehan and her book of poems titled “Orient Point” which is a tremendous piece as a whole as each piece resonates with the reader through her range and strength and reverence for the language.
The first thing that struck me when reading “Orient point” was that Ms. Sheehan isn’t afraid to (Gasp!!!) rhyme. Personally I love it. I tend to think that a poet is more considerate of their choice of words when delving into the world of rhyme and structured meter. It’s too easy to lay out stream of conscious claptrap and pronounce it a poem, let’s face it …even Kerouac falls flat on more than one occasion.
Sheehan goes that extra step. She carefully constructs her thoughts and verse. Take, for instance, “Sonnet: On a Recurring Argument Going Nowhere”:
The red-eyed gas gauge glares: attend! attend!
But you insist we’re nowhere near empty.
We taxi past Texacos, bypass BPs,
Our engine inventing fuel, me at wit’s end,
you fuming at my lack of confidence.
We pause at last, a Shell somewhere in Jersey
Not to fill up, but just to buy some candy.
By now I’ve hit the interstate of silence,
The pissed-off lane, the sullen bend, the unsound
skid and brakes. I ponder where to go
the next chance I can take a sabbatical.
The car konks out. Stillness emphatical.
I’ve never much complained of breaking down
until today. Guess what: I told you so.

Sheehan takes the wonderful Petrarchan form and makes it palatable to the modern reader. Her skillful use of enjambment allows this to read in a conversational vein, but make no mistake, each word is placed within a well crafted structure. Her subject matter – the simple act of running out of gas – looms so much larger as the masterful metaphor of the inability to communicate or even a relationship that has ‘run out of gas’. The humorous tone is hammered home with a rhyme Gilbert and Sullivan would envy; sabbatical/emphatical.
Too, Sheehan offers several free verse poems, mixed in with her sonnets and ghazals and never loses sight of the purpose of poetry, which is to entertain and enlighten.
This book was the winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and deservedly so. A must have for you poetry library.