Randall Jarrell once praised Richard Wilbur’s “lyric calling-to-life of the things of this world.” A similar awakening takes place in Deborah Warren’s Dream with Flowers and Bowl of Fruit, recipient of the 2008 Richard Wilbur Award. In the title poem, Warren candidly admits that her “dreams these days are boring”:
Fruit is low on drama, and I miss
Passion, flying, falling, being chased,
Crashing, panic—trauma—and I miss,
Small and quick, a movement in the grapes,
And the shiver of a petal in the vase.
The last two lines are beautiful and memorable: the way “vase” sounds against “miss” and “grapes,” and the way the lines disrupt the poem’s chronology. Is Warren describing a dream she would like to have, or one she has not had in a long time? Or, are the flowers and grapes moving in real time in front of her?
“Song of the Egg” is one of the most arresting poems in the book and is worth quoting in full:
If, when he looked, a prophet saw
inside the egg’s imperfect O
a bantam little shadow—death
already curled in the heart of the embryo—it would be too small a flaw
to brood on, if he heard as well,
clearer than light, a brilliant crowing
shatter the brittle confines of the shell.
This poem functions in the same way as the title poem quoted above: death and life exist symbiotically, much like melodrama and