Mrs. Schmetterling
for the poets Ewa Lipska & Carolyn Forché and for my daughters, Chelsea Lindquist & Jamie Lynn Wise.
The figure on the canvas has the face and hands of a woman.
Eve in a habit. Eve with yellow, laundry tape wings.
Mrs. Schmetterling too is an accumulation of stains.
She wonders how she, or anyone, removes the stains of history.
from “Stain”
Listen to the poem. . .
Buy the book from Arrowsmith Press or Bookshop.
In the Balance of Final Things
from Nidia Hernandez’s poetry site, La Maja Desnuda
Blind (2020) by Sarah Fisher, blind embossed print & dry cleaning identification stickers on paper, 25 x 19 inches
The ancient prophets were often blind, and not particularly well received.
Consider Tiresias or Cassandra or Homer himself.
Or Eli or Ahijah the Shilonite, even Paul along the road to Damascus.
Musicians too have been known to be blind. Old bluesmen
like Blind Lemon Jefferson or the Blind Willies—Johnson and Mctell—
or Ray Charles on the keys. Though music may make truth
easier to hear. Mrs. Schmetterling too has begun to lose her sight,
though she hasn’t discovered any ancillary prophetic powers. . .
from “Blindness”
Listen to the poem. . .
Reviews
Robin Davidson’s Mrs. Schmetterling, a sequence of poems paired with and inspired by the stunning artwork of Sarah Fisher, brings us into the deeply personal yet universally relatable inner world of a woman questioning herself and her life with intelligence and fearlessness.
Mrs. Schmetterling is the continuation of a project Davidson began as a translator of the Polish poet Ewa Lipska, picking up the intimate conversations found in Lipska’s Dear Ms. Schubert, giving voice to a new protagonist. Mrs. Schmetterling joins the ranks of such classic literary figures as the talkative Mrs. Biswas of Reetika Vazirani’s White Elephants and Virginia Woolf’s forever anxious Mrs. Dalloway. She may well be a cousin to Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr. Cogito. Mrs. Schmetterling captures the spirit of a unique female voice in lines chiseled and shimmering.
—Askold Melnyczuk, Arrowsmith Press
If it took Lipska sixteen years to develop the character of Ms. Schubert, it took almost that long for Davidson to birth Mrs. Schmetterling. . .Most importantly, her “second generation” character developed a contemporary outlook about the commonality of women’s dilemmas between family and career, sacrifice and self-fulfillment across time and cultures. . .
Lipska’s Ms. Schubert was a maiden domestic character; she loved and cared for her devoted admirer, Mr. Schmetterling, whose infallible devotion educated her in the fine points of high European culture during an elusive romance steeped in Viennese cafés, lovers’ secret codes, Ferris wheel rides, promenades on riverbanks, erudite readings, handsewn coats, and tender meetings in hotel rooms somewhere in central Europe. Mrs. Schmetterling is assertive and exotic. She is a woman with multiple ethnic and national identities and cultural allegiances. Born in the Italian city of the “Duomo,” which could be any major Italian city with a large Roman Catholic church building, she lives in Kraków, a city foreign to her, takes daily walks in the parks that surround the old city, cooks and sews, and awaits the mail. She has lived in Ukraine, in L’viv, where over one hundred thousand Polish Jews took refuge in World War II, and the gardens where her children once played sound like American backyards. She cultivates a flower from the Southern seas, the amaryllis, and she revives amidst the local chestnut trees. She weaves nature within herself and always returns to it as her anchor, describing her heart as “a flight of cranes.”
—Alice-Catherine Carls, World Literature Today