EVERWINE, Peter (Paul)

---

Nationality: American. Born: Detroit, Michigan, 14 February 1930. Education: Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, B.S. 1952; Stanford University, California, 1958–59; University of Iowa, Iowa City, Ph.D. 1959. Military Service: U.S. Army, 1952–54. Family: Divorced; two children. Career: Instructor in English, University of Iowa, 1959–62. Since 1962 professor of English, California State University, Fresno. Awards: Lamont Poetry Selection award, 1972; Guggenheim fellowship, 1976. Address: Department of English, California State University, Fresno, California 93710, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

The Broken Frieze. Mt. Vernon, Iowa, Hillside Press, 1958.

In the House of Light: Thirty Aztec Poems. Iowa City, Stone Wall Press, 1970.

Collecting the Animals. New York, Atheneum, 1973.

Keeping the Night. New York, Atheneum, 1977.

Other

Editor and Translator, with Shulamit Yasny-Starkman, The Static Element: Selected Poems of Natan Zach. New York, Atheneum, 1982.

*  *  *

The quantity of Peter Everwine's poetry is slight, but the quality is gemlike. Some of the poems in Keeping the Night were anthologized earlier in The New Naked Poetry. "Nude" would have been a more fitting adjective to describe his art. His poetry is neither raw nor bare. It is subtler—precise but unadorned, palpable, and dumb. It achieves its effect slowly. It wants to be read over and over. It unfolds in silence and in empty spaces. "Night," from Keeping the Night, which is quite like haiku, is typical of Everwine's manner:

   In the lamplight falling
   on the white tablecloth
   my plate
   my shining loaf of quietness.
 
 
   I sit down.
   Through the open door
   all the absent I love enter
   and we eat.

At its best Everwine's poetry is deceptively simple. Largely monosyllabic, invariably brief, his poems mold speech to express unspoken, deeply felt truths found in moments selected from ordinary life, either his own or that of his kin.

The earlier volume In the House of Light is made up of Everwine's translations of Spanish transcriptions of poems of the Nahuatl-speaking peoples of Mexico. Everwine observed that one of the words used for a poet in Nahuatl is tlamatine (one who knows something), and in his verse translations he offers "an attempt to locate that ancient presence in my own speech" (Collecting the Animals). He succeeds brilliantly.

The seeming simplicity of Everwine's work establishes an aura of trust and candor rarely found in contemporary poetry. His poetry is unmarred by self-consciousness. There is no stridency, no verbal fireworks, no exhibitionism. Nor is there any hint of sentimentality in the many memories he evokes. In "Drinking Cold Water," from Collecting the Animals, the re-creation of his tough-spirited grandmother who "lay down in the shale hills of Pennsylvania" years before is completely authentic:

   all I can think of is your house—
   the pump at the sink
   spilling a trough of clear
   cold water from the well—
   and you, old love,
   sleeping in your dark dress
   like a hard, white root.

His Italian grandfather, who immigrated to the United States and spat in the wind, quit his job, and returned to Italy every time his bosses maddened him, is depicted with equal vividness in "Paolo Castelnuova," from Keeping the Night. The poem ends with the grandson, the persona, penning the will the old man did not leave:

   I, Paolo, give my stone to the priests.
   Tell them to make it bread.
 
 
   Water I give to those loving how money sweats.
 
 
   Fire I leave to my children
 
 
   As for air,
   give it to the buzzard who is the first
   and last of kings.

The other portraits in Keeping the Night and Collecting the Animals—of Dorothy, "her ass rubbed raw through half the fields in Armstrong County," of his immigrant mother who was never really American until grass closed over her gravestone, of his sons—are equally precise and real.

Whether Everwine searches for a language to hold the night's secrets, childhood recollections, or the paradoxical condition of a man who eats dinner while talking with his guests of the dead past and never looking at "the axe lying in the courtyard, a crust of blood and feathers on its edge" ("The Dinner" from Keeping the Night), he catches exactly the experience he knows. He has learned his experience and his craft "hand over hand," as he says in another poem in a slightly different context.

—Carol Simpson Stern