The Season's Edge

Poems by Mary Nyman

The Season's Edge And Other Poems is a celebration of ideas which draws upon the natural environment overlooking Buzzards Bay and the Cape Cod Canal. The photographs focus on sunsets and flowers and on the incredible beauty of the vast expanse of water outside the poet's window.

published by
Todd and Honeywell, Inc.
Ten Cuttermill Road
Great Neck NY 11021
1984 (not in business under this name in October 2000)
ISBN 0-89962-384-0

[mary.]

From the 1984 dust jacket:

Mary Mallon Nyman was born in Evanston, Illinois. She grew up in Clarksville, Tennessee and spent her summers on Torch Lake in Alden, Michigan. After spending one year in France and one in Washington, D.C. she came to New England in 1953 to attend Wheaton College where she earned her undergraduate degree in English and won the Helen Meyers Tate Memorial Prize for Original Verse in 1955 and 1956. She attended Boston University and received her Master's degree in English Literature in 1959.

Since 1961 she has lived in Wareham, Massachusetts in her home which is one mile into the woods, on a high cliff overlooking Buzzards Bay. She has five children, ages 23 to 14, along with two German shepherds, two quarter horses, and Rosie, the cat. Since 1976 she has taught English at Wareham High School.

Ms. Nyman first began writing poetry when she was eight. She is a great lover of the out-of-doors and a nature poet, and she cites Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson as primary influences.

Currently, she has been invited to participate as the poet finalist from Massachusetts at the NEATE (New England Association of Teachers of English) Poet of the Year Competition - to be held in New Hampshire the latter part of October.

A Child's Dilemma

I. Reflections in the Pond - Looking Back

Reflections in the pond that disappear
At the edge of the pool, pale-glazed, smooth and clear,
Rendering the image of surrounding turf,
The rush and the flower of Indian red
In mirrored perfection - a glassy head
Of features iced in to a brittle skin.

Then the child throws in pebbles
And shatters the image,
Disfigures the flower and scatters the fragments
That spread out in wavelets of particled red.
Til the pool stares back with its vacant stare

And the child runs away through the sand and the glare.

II. Predicament

Within a host of cluttered vines
A forest of strange stretching blooms
Shoots tangled stamens, twisted in retort.

One startles, hot in scarlet dress,
Reflects the sun in its embrace
Until I want to clasp it to my face,

Desirous of a perfume pit
And an inveigling texture, smooth
As alkalines. I'd seize, destroy this beauty,

In some mode unspeakable;
I'd wrench maliciously
The bloom - tortured in writhing in retreat;

So warm and yet it feels of ice,
So cold it burns with poisonous fire -
As dry ice fires the fingers with its warmth.

The bloom, a carrion of truth
So undenied it needs destruction
From the mirage of loveliness I have

Bestowed, that tricks the eye and hand
Until we look away, the glare
Add touch too opposite to make us laugh.

We turn away, again to find
The flower in a different form -
A paradox in color, frozen fired.

"Predicament" was first published in
Rushlight, Vol. 102 No. 1, December 1955,
Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts,
with textual variants:

8 forbidden texture
10 In a mode unspeakable;
11 How I'd wrench maliciously
22 Yes, turned away to later find
23 The flower in a different form;
24 A color complement, but frozen fired.

Renaissance

Apple and pear
Surmount New England stone again.
The ocean melds into the clouds.
The fog hides buttercup and weed along the pasture fence.

My senses mushroom in the dark recesses of the barn
Under muzzles, soft and warm,
Of the solid, strong and tender beasts,
Dumb from the fields of life's abundance.
In spring it is time to go forth into the world again -
Unfolding, yielding and free.

E-mail Mary Nyman.

E-mail the Webmaster

Go to Bob Richmond's personal Web site site map

Posted to the Web October 6th, 2000
Revised May 28th, 2004