One of poetry's dreams is amplitude, the book of poems that gives a sense of life's fullness, even as it depicts the losses. Nancy Meneely's Simple Absence speaks eloquently to that dream, the range of poems honoring and testifying to a host of situations--public and private. Each poem deftly enacts the drama of trammeled and untrammeled emotion. Though the poems embody essences of form and feeling, lines and stanzas moving crisply down the pages, there is nothing minimal here. The breadth and depth are both inspiring.
There's nothing absent in these richly-textured, various-structured, deeply-felt and capacious poems (plus a few prose pieces). Great pleasure is to be garnered from Meneely's powers of description; precise, wholly new, better than anyone's I know. Wonder is here, as well, in the particular objects, observations, ideas and emotions this poet chooses to treat as subjects: idiosyncratic in the best sense. From first thought to last, the reader's ride is electric and ultimately bedazzling.
Nancy Fitz-Hugh Meneely, Smith College B.A. in hand and nothing at all to suggest she knew how to make a lesson plan, began professional life as an English teacher in Vermont's Waterbury High School. When, after two happy years, Vermont suggested it was important that she sport a real credential, she acquired a Master of Arts in Teaching from Yale. After discovering her best students were listening to her from inside hallucinations, she moved into the work of training community/school teams in drug abuse prevention at Yale's Drug Dependence Institute. Later, with a Master's of Education in Human Relations from the UMass School of Education, she tacked back and forth across a career path in training, counseling and education, finishing paid employment in a twenty-year career with the Federal Emergency Management Agency in Washington, DC, where she worked first in emergency management training and then directly in support of response and recovery operations. She retired north, where she lives what Baron Wormser calls "the poetry life" on the beautiful Connecticut shoreline, happily engaged in writing, discussing, judging, teaching and performing readings of poetry. Her first book, Letter from Italy, 1944, provided the libretto for an oratorio composed by her sister, Sarah Meneely Kyder, performed most recently by The Hartford and Greater Middletown Chorales along with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra at the Bushnell in Hartford. Letter from Italy, 1944 was named by the Hartford Courant one of thirteen important books produced in 2013 by Connecticut writers.
