The Master Letters opens with “Carrowmore,” a decorous, restrained lyric about a girl finding an ornament and a piece of hair—two offerings, she surmises, to a dead predecessor—in the earth:
She buried her bone barrette
In the ground’s woolly shaft.
A tear of her hair, an old giftTo the burnt other who went
First. My thick braid, my ornament—My belonging I
Remember how cold I will be.
In terms of style, however, “Carrowmore” is not an augur of things to come in this book-long tribute to Emily Dickinson. Many of Brock-Broido’s poems—her title comes from three letters Dickinson left in her drawer at her death, one addressed to “Recipient Unknown” and two to “Master”—are composed in a sinewy, ornate language that recalls Gerard Manley Hopkins more than Dickinson:
That I had no idea I had been travelling
In the scrying light, crutched friar roamingSnow-apple orchards every autumn,
Clutching the fireless stricken lanternOf your feudal dark …
Brock-Broido’s modern-day verse epistles are addressed not to one particular “Master,” but to men in general; some express anguish and anger, others an amusing obsequiousness spoken in a mock-groveling tone. Occasionally there is a note of defiance: “I am … nobody’s panther … nobody’s violin … nobody’s isotope … nobody’s humming bird.” And yet, Brock-Broido’s sequence isn’t feminist; it’s too ambivalent, unpredictable, and rifled with self-doubt for that. In “Grimoire,” a poem near the end, Brock-Broido announces that