above the bulk of crashing waves
five cinquins of Adelaide Crapsey
1. Niagara
2. The Warning
3. November Night
4. Night Winds
5. Fate Defied
The poetry of Adelaide Crapsey looks unblinkingly at its subjects. Her images of the natural world capture life’s awe and strangeness with a deep, overarching sadness, dread, and looming sense of mortality. And yet under Crapsey’s terse, uncompromising gaze a kind of transfiguration occurs. Something magisterial lingers at the end of each of her poems: the moon, frail and distant, hanging in the sky; a leaf falling, midair; the nagging feeling of a revelation.
One slim volume called Verse, first published posthumously in 1915, contains the collected poetry of Crapsey who died in 1914 at the young age of 36. She is known for the cinquain, an innovative poetic form that features five unrhymed lines which grow from two to four to six to eight syllables before abruptly closing with another two syllable line which often includes an unexpected turn. These cinquains offer a musical challenge of creating a sound world that is similarly compressed and evocative. My settings of her cinquains each last only a minute or two. Taken together, this cycle of miniatures seeks to capture the sorrow, foreboding, and ever present sense of wonder in Crapsey’s work.
