The Vineyard (A Poem)

A delightful account of the seasons in a house and its garden near the sea, a domestic idyll of hardy plants and neighbors, outer and inner weather, love and loss, and taking stock of the life we’ve made

The delicious long-form poem “The Vineyard” is set in and around the quasi-fictional Long Island village of Oyster Ponds, where the poet spends the summer months. In free-flowing lines and pages that turn with the calendar, the poem unspools impressions that seem confided rather than written, as Galassi observes the “pretend peace’’ of this quiet house and garden, his oasis in the turbulence of dailiness. Themes and imagery recur, swerve, and transform as he watches the vineyard next door come alive, thrive, and die away only to return the next year, different but the same, in our time of plague, climate threat, and a culture that too often seems to attack what is enduring and fundamental.

But this book is not a complaint or a raging against the dying of the light: it is an honest record of seeing and feeling in a beloved place, of gratitude, of searching for one’s center. As the poet describes the wisteria vine that sends out suckers into the lawn and the long and complex tale of the village and its inhabitants, this modern eclogue becomes an ample container for Jonathan’s life: he’s having a chat with us about all he notices and dreams, about tending his plants and cooking and gossiping, about loving a man and aging, about his mother and Vita Sackville-West and bike-riding and having regrets. The narrative swells and touches us in its surprising turns; sometimes whole poems swim up and hold a page in the midst of its ongoing narrative, reminding us of the ways that writing can shape the quotidian.

This intimate, unhurried, and unpretentious poem of past and present will stand as the central work of Jonathan Galassi’s career.