Still Life in Landscape

"The Lyric “I” Drives to Pick up Her Children from School: A Poem in the Postconfessional Mode" by Olena Kalytiak Davis (2005)

In this experimental poem with elements of narrative, Davis explores subjectivity and identity. Like “Still Life in Landscape,” this poem references personal history and other works of art. Davis more pointedly and self-consciously plays with the idea of the speaker as poet and not-poet.

"The Death of Antinoüs" by Mark Doty (1990)

Mark Doty’s elegiac poem also examines form and identity, not through the remains of the deceased, but through artistic copies of his form. As in “Still Life in Landscape,” the speaker reflects on the inaccuracy of memory and the limits of imitation.

"In a Station of the Metro" by Ezra Pound (1913)

Ezra Pound’s two-line poem describes a kind of still life, a frozen moment of perception the speaker attempts to capture in words. Pound’s “wet, black bough” (Line 2) echoes in Olds’s “wet black macadam” (Line 16); both images serve as dark foils for bright objects.

"Adventure at Midnight" by Muriel Rukeyser (1936)

Olds cites Rukeyser as a significant influence. In this poem, Rukeyser also uses the metaphor of travel to depict mortality and the omnipresence of catastrophe. A boat rather than a car carries the reader into “a drowning world” (Line 16), but it’s “condemned” (Line 18); the escape of travel delays the inevitable, and memory anchors us unreliable.

"Good Bones" by Maggie Smith (2017)

Maggie Smith portrays the tension and responsibility of motherhood, the obligation to protect children from mortality and terror.