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Professor of English Alice Fulton addresses themes ranging from mortality and suffering to gift-giving in her new poetry collection.

As the title of Alice Fulton’s new poetry collection, “Barely Composed,” suggests, the writer has a penchant for wordplay. But there is also gravity in her work, and reviewers have noted a concern with certain themes this time around – time, love and death.

Fulton doesn’t deny it: “That’s big stuff. You could probably write about nothing else,” she said. “Time is so mysterious, and it’s a topic in science and the arts – it’s the enemy, I sometimes say. It’s running out on us.”

“In the past I don’t think I concentrated so much on these three topics. It wasn’t a programmatic decision, or something I had an agenda about,” she said. “Anything I wrote about for this book was what seemed to be pressing. My mother died in 2009, and I was her caregiver. Watching her suffer changed me in ways that were unforeseen. I really didn’t know what was coming at me; it was very difficult.”

“I did lose whatever faith I had in the universe being kind,” Fulton said. “There’s something I wrote in my notebook: ‘There’s an inch of mercy in the universe and that is where I send my atheist prayers.’ It just came to me – if I’m praying, what am I praying to?”

The experience made her think about how we engage with human suffering.

“In order to put my own trauma in perspective, I began to read about people who had gone through far, far more terrible suffering,” she said. “I began reading books on trauma – what’s called trauma theory now – on the Holocaust, Abu Ghraib.”

Which may have affected the poems she was writing. “I thought, ‘this book is too dark.’ I began to put in parts of light, partly through humor – it’s part of being human,” Fulton said. “I’m sure we are lucky in that way, in that animals can’t smile and laugh. Another thing I thought was brighter and happier was the theme of a gift. What do we give to each other?”

“I’ve fallen in the habit of giving gifts. You’re kind of being a prophet, trying to say ‘I understand you’ when you give something. And sometimes you can be totally wrong. Sometimes you just have to laugh about it. A gift is a risk – or as the Germans say, a gift is a task. You’re trying to say something without language. I also thought about birthdays and Valentine’s Day, and the ethnography of giving.”

Fulton, MFA ’82, is the Ann S. Bowers Professor of English at Cornell. She is teaching advanced poetry for undergraduates and the MFA poetry workshop this semester. “I love the students here,” she said. “The undergraduates are the best I’ve ever taught.” Her graduate students are also impressive, “and they’re good company. A year or two out of the program they publish books, very good books.”

“Barely Composed” (96 pp., W.W. Norton, 2015) is her first new poetry collection since “Felt,” published in 2001 (and winner of the 2002 Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry). It follows her interlaced short-story collection, “The Nightingales of Troy: Connected Stories” (2008).

“After I finished the fiction book in 2008, I just missed poetry and thought I’d get back to it,” she said. “I hadn’t written much poetry while writing ‘Nightingales’ – maybe two poems in this book were written in 2004. But I love poetry, it’s one of my huge interests and I never meant to give it up.”

She continues to work on new poems. “This book ended, but the ideas don’t end and the feelings don’t end,” Fulton said. “It’s not like the Three Fates, cutting the thread.”

From ‘Triptych For Topological Heart’

It befalls us. An exchanged glance, reflective spasm.

Is it a fantastically unlaminated question set in flesh
or valentine that wears the air as its apparel?
If you cut a heart from parchment, is it still
a heart? A nontrivial knot, where turns of every gradient
may kiss and tell. Does the vessel have edges?
Or is it all connectedness, an embedding to be stretched
or bent. Imagine being simultaneously alive,
bound in both directions with a bow! Is it diachronic,
a phenomenon that changes over time? Without ardor
theory suffers. That’s why I’m stuck on you with wanton glue, per-
severing, styling something blobbish and macabre
into something pointed, neat. Love is a gift
that springs from an unlit spot. Resin and rue.
Even when I’m in the dark I’m in the dark with you.

– Alice Fulton (from ‘Barely Composed')