We Lit the Lamps Ourselves [ペーパーバック]

We Lit the Lamps Ourselves by Andrea Potos is a luminous tribute to those women writers who lived in semi-shadow but thrust their stories, poems and journal observations into the light.

Potos writes about Charlotte, Anne and Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Sylvia Plath, but the poems about the Bronte sisters are the most numerous and compelling in this collection as Potos recreates the difficult lives these women lived and makes clear their incredible fortitude. From what fire inside her did Emily Bronte forge an understanding of sexual despair and passion so great in Wuthering Heights that the speaker in "To Emily Bronte" recalls "my heart held stunned in my chest" when she first encountered that story. Later, as a mother, she hurries to put her child to bed so she can escape her own domestic world, "forgetting the phone, the bell,/the dishwasher's gurgle and churn" to lose herself in the Bronte biography. The woman enthralled by the Bronte sisters eventually walks the moors herself and visits the rooms that once housed her heroines. Potos takes on the voices of the sisters, conjuring the cold, stony, solitary lives of loyal devotion amidst sickness and loss, and all that still managed to grow from "rooted sorrow," especially their stunning novels and Emily's verse, which Charlotte once noted, was "Not at all like the poetry women generally write."

While much of the book resides in nineteenth century Yorkshire England (with an occasional jaunt to Amherst, MA, and Dorset, England), a few poems light down in contemporary America. For example, in one poem the speaker tries to read Jane Eyre while working out on a treadmill, knowing full well the Bronte sisters "never thought of calories as / they trod their restless moors." And near the book's ending, Potos loosely imitates Emily Dickinson's style as she lends the two Emily's (Dickinson and Bronte) a voice that carries a certain contemporary bravado (as if Potos is shouting, "enough self-effacement and invisibility! enough regret and shame and depression! claim your greatness!"): "We Lit the Lamps--ourselves / went out--Sisters // (as it should be) / in Eternity now."

The book's title, "We Lit the Lamps Ourselves," is inclusionary--Potos' collection is another lamp. The title is also a quiet declaration of independence that contains an acknowledgment of gratitude to those women writers who preceded us. This is a book you will want to keep and return to.