Delmarva Today 2-4-22
Harold Wilson’s guest is poet Sue Ellen Thompson. They discuss her new book of poetry Sea Nettles. Sue Ellen is the author of five previous books of poetry, and her work has been read more than a dozen times by Garrison Keillor on National Public Radio. She’s received the Pushcart Prize and been nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize. This new book by Sue Ellen Thompson is made up of both new poems and selected poems. The new poems appear to reach to a more universal or existential level of the human experience than some of her earlier work. “Behind these poems,” she writes in a promotional note, “lurks the knowledge that none of us can know what fate has in store for us.” This comment would suggest a more philosophical approach in these poems that reaches beyond the psychological and social structures that make up our human intercourse. As she suggests in her note, these new poems confront us with the fact that we are not in control in this world even though the decisions we make encourage us to believe that we are. Loss, the indifference of the universe, fate, the corrosive nature of time, the contradiction of our own caring and not caring, and the ever-present stings of the past make up the existential environment in which we swim