CLAIRE CONSIDERS Naming the Silence and The Pearl Diver’s Daughter poetry by Michael Blanchard

CLAIRE CONSIDERS

Naming the Silence and The Pearl Diver’s Daughter poetry by Michael Blanchard

When by his own admission Michael David Blanchard was an introspective teenager, he began writing poetry as a student at Baton Rouge High in Louisiana. He continued composing in college and twice won the University (of Virginia) Union Fine Arts Award for Poetry. In his professional days after earning his Masters, his poems were published in various literary journals while he worked as a college professor, editor, writer, and advocate for the dying with hospice organizations.

Yet, a definitive published collection of his own works eluded him until in his sixties Blanchard reexamined some of his best works for inclusion in an impressive book, Naming the Silence: New & Selected Poems. Spanning five decades of Blanchard’s writings, the volume is both a compilation of finely crafted poems and a thoughtful extended meditation on the creative process. It is, simply put, a book worth waiting for and a splendid collection. Then more recently, Blanchard’s The Pearl Diver’s Daughter was published, a collection of his newer works. These pieces are gently intellectual and lyrical poems which often question the place for both poetry and for a poet. Filled with evocative sensory details, radiant natural images, and a frequent sense of curiosity and wonder, the poems are a delight—and sometimes a mystery. 

In The Pearl Diver’s Daughter, Blanchard uses the pearl of the title poem as a metaphor for poetry. With that as a unifying image, he creates other multi-layered, nuanced pieces that cross delicately between assessable and allusive, inviting his readers –like the pearl diver—to push “beneath the surface where two lives diverge.” Within his poetry, sometimes a gemstone is a diamond, and then, again, sometimes it is a universe of “myriad points / of distant lights.” 

In some contrast to the poems in The Pearl Diver’s Daughter, Blanchard wrote many of the works in Naming the Silence during his years as a creative writing professor at Troy State University in Alabama (now Troy University). Blanchard’s Troy years were marked by turmoil and rapid-fire changes. During that time, in what he described as a particularly long, hot summer, Blanchard confronted the unexpected death of two friends, one in the crash of an Air Force jet he was piloting and the other a former girlfriend in childbirth. Blanchard—still in his twenties—captured the experiences with counterbalancing themes of loss and hope in “Autumn Comes to the Deep South,” the longest piece in Naming the Silence. This poem begins as a contemplation on death and loss and on the lives of those who have occupied the old house where the poet then resided: “One day they will tear down this house / and all the houses where I’ve passed time / and all the roads leading to them / will lead nowhere and all that’s left / will be the space I’ve kept / open and silent…” 

Sometimes Blanchard stands behind his classical education with intellectual allusions in crafting his poems, yet all of Blanchard’s fine poems in both collections are lushly imagined and filled with vibrant images. He excels at blending the natural with the spiritual and the practical with the creative process, and his splendid poems can carry the reader through a sensory-laden world of wonder and beauty. All in all, both books are fine collections of tender, thoughtful poetry reflecting a poet with an scholarly bent, as well as observant eyes, a profound memory, and ears sensitive to the music in both our world and in words. 

Copies of Naming the Silence and The Pearl Diver’s Daughter can be obtained from the poet via  mdblanchard719@gmail.com and Naming the Silence is also available at online stores. 

Michael David Blanchard is a native of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He now lives in the Cadron Valley of Arkansas, where he teaches at the University of Central Arkansas and edits SLANT, the university’s international journal of contemporary poetry.