Poetry
Birthright
A Letterpress Edition by
Birch Brook Press, 2011
Art by Helen Febbo
Second printing now available!
"The poems in this stunning first volume form a procession both into and away from unmitigated hearbreak: of a mother over the death of a daughter, of a granddaughter upon learning of a grandfather's suicide, of a member of the infinite family of redeemed sinners. Throughout, Gwendolyn Jensen's grace is at once relentless and restrained, every bit as voluptuous as it is formal.
You hear the drumbeat of a fierce insistence in these gorgeous, metrical poems. Consider the spare elegy to the speaker's failing dog, Lucy:
There is a code
A mindful pattern that defines a dog,
The dignity of dog—to lie to cool
The belly in a gutter puddle, to sens
The sense of rolling in dead squirrel, to know
The art, the science, of separation,
When to wait, to let go, to be done.
Each of these poems could have been uttered while lighting an altar candle in a large, empty cathedral. Listen to the ceremonial silence that swells the end of each line with its echoes. They are enormously private, yet enormously ours. For that, we owe this poet not only rapt attention, but gratitude."
—Frannie Lindsay, author of Mayweed,
winner of the 2009 Washington Prize.
Biography
Gwendolyn Jensen was born in 1936 and grew up in Lansdowne, PA. She began writing poems when she retired in 2001 from Wilson College (Chambersburg, PA) where she had served as president for ten years. Her Bachelors degree is from the University of Hartford, her Masters from Trinity College (Hartford), and her Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut.
After teaching history at the University of New Haven she moved into administrative work serving as graduate dean at the University of New Haven, and then as academic dean, first at Western State College (Gunnison, CO) and then at Marietta College (Marietta, OH).
She and her husband Gordon Jensen have three children, one of whom has died, and two grandsons. They live in Cambridge, MA.
Translation
Paul Celan (1920-1970) was a poet and translator, born to a Jewish family in Romania, he lived in Paris after the war. He was one of the major German poets of the twentieth century.
The poem below was translated from the German by Gwendolyn Jensen and Monika Totten.
Count the almonds,
count what was bitter, what kept you awake,
count me among them:
When no one looked at you I looked at you,
I spun a secret thread, a wick,
on it the dew of your thought
slid down into urns
where it was guarded by a magic spell that no one understood.
There, for the first time, you stepped fully into your name,
you strode on sure feet toward yourself,
the hammer swung free in the bell tower of your silences,
the sound came to embrace you,
something of death put its arm around you,
and the three of you walked through the evening together.
Make me bitter.
Count me among the almonds.
by Paul Celan
Totten and Jensen work together on translations from the German. This Celan is the poem their partnership cut its teeth on. It is included in Birthright as a part of the sequence “Childhood Bends Beside Me.” Totten and Jensen are currently working on the poetry of Karoline von Günderrode (1780-1806).
Monika Totten’s Ph.D. Is from the Harvard Department of Germanic Literatures and Language. She is currently teaching at Tufts University.
Readings
June 2, 2012, 2:30 p.m.
Patterson Lounge, Laird Hall, Wilson College, Chambersburg, PA
A reading at Wilson College. Open to the public.
August 7, 2012, 5 - 7 p.m.
Grolier Poetry Book Shop, 6 Plympton Street, Cambridge, MA
signing and reading
Contact
If you would like to contact Gwendolyn Jensen, please fill in this form.