This issue of Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices arrives bearing sad news. We are heartbroken to learn of the recent passing of the poet, teacher, translator, and literary ambassador Danielle Legros Georges, who died at her home in Dorchester on February 11th. Born in Haiti, Danielle moved to Boston with her family as a child, and had been a passionate literary figure in the community for decades. In her own poems and in her extensive translations, Danielle focused much of her attention on the Haitian diaspora. She taught for many years at Lesley University, and served as Boston’s second Poet Laureate. She was also a consulting poetry editor for Solstice, contributing numerous reviews and poems in the journal’s formative years. She was a dynamic reader, choreographing her phrasing with a dancer’s elegant gestures. I had the great fortune to take a class on translation with her, and she brought that same dynamic intensity into the classroom that she radiated from the podium.
I looked back through our archives and encountered Danielle’s poem “The Poem to be the Poem that Was,” which was published in Solstice in Spring 2012, an encapsulation of her gift for perfectly-wrought imagery, drawing connections across the range of human experience, bridging between her beloved communities of Boston and Haiti:
A Poem to be the Poem that Was
winding itself down a dark alleyway
when dusk was most dusk and threatening
day with never returning.
A poem becoming the most subtle mother,
the sweetest and meanest keeper of bones,
and breaker of them.
A poem to be a hospital, in all it means
to recuperate the weary, to medicate a malady
out of a lime body, out of blue veins.
When this poem finally utters its name,
flames also utter theirs, a copper pot
boils over with froth, it steams,
a sputter shivers and draws a blank,
a blanket won’t do for cover.
When this poems says yes, a thousand
yeses dress themselves for a fête
and dance with no nos no matter
how well they play the coquet.
Danielle, rest in peace and in the power of the word.
We do, of course, have new works in this issue to carry the tradition forward. Jennifer Sweeney, also a dancer, offers a fascinating insight into the mechanics of a ballerina’s grace in “Rosin.” Ron Riekki’s “When I worked in the prison, it reminded me of the military” is a compelling meditation on consequences of male violence. Betsy Sholl recalls an earlier era of bigotry in “Brown v. Board” which reverberates into the current moment. We hope you can find the poem that can be the poem that you need in these uncertain times.
Robbie Gamble
Poetry Editor
Robbie Gamble’s essays have appeared in Scoundrel Time, Pangyrus, Pithead Chapel, Under the Gum Tree and Tahoma Literary Review. He was a 2019 Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Summer Writers Workshop. He worked many years as a nurse practitioner caring for homeless people in Boston, and now divides his time between Massachusetts and Vermont.
