Deep Water: ‘Willow Street,’ by Jonathan Aldrich
Maine poems edited and introduced by Megan Grumbling.
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This week we feature a poem by the accomplished and much beloved Cape Elizabeth poet Jonathan Aldrich, who passed away last week. In “Willow Street,” from Aldrich’s first book, the speaker describes a place “not far from here” that also seems to be something more than a place. As the poem weaves gracefully between the tangible and the abstract, the space and state it conjures feel both mysterious and deeply, timelessly familiar.
Aldrich wrote over a dozen books in his 40-year career as a poet. At Harvard College, he won the William Lloyd Garrison Prize for poetry and the Academy of American Poets Award, and he was a Frost Scholar at The Bread Loaf School of English. His translation of Charles Baudelaire’s “Le Voyage,” illustrated by Allison Hildreth and hand-printed by David Wolfe Productions, won a Baxter Society Award. Aldrich also taught English at