Harold Wilson’s guest is poet Sue Ellen Thompson. They discuss her new book of poetry Sea Nettles.
Thompson is the author of five previous books of poetry, and her work has been read more than a dozen times by Garrison Keillor on National Public Radio. She has received the Pushcart Prize and been nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize. Her new book is made up of both new poems and selected poems. According to Wilson, her new poems reach to a more universal or existential level of the human experience than some of her earlier work. “Behind these poems,” she writes in a promotional note, “lurks the knowledge that none of us can know what fate has in store for us.” This points to a more philosophical construct that reaches beyond the psychological structures that make up our human intercourse.
The new poems confront us with the fact that we are not in control in this world even though the decisions we make encourage us to believe that we are. Loss, the indifference of the universe, fate, the corrosive nature of time, the contradiction of our own caring and not caring, and the ever-present stings of the past make up the existential environment in which we swim.
