Melissa Range is the fortunate inheritor of Dickinson’s knack for questions, of a marrow-deep understanding of English’s Saxon roots, and of Hopkins’ slant rhyme (or “intermittent chimin’” as she calls it). Born and raised in East Tennessee, she is currently working on her PhD in English and creative writing at the University of Missouri, and her debut collection, Horse and Rider,was published in 2010. The slim volume bristles with life; the poems bite and echo like a remix of Beowulf with Blind Willie Johnson’s “John the Revelator.” Range has described her poetry as exploring the tension between God’s love and wrath, as in “The Conversion of Saul Imagined as a Scene in a Western,” where she witnesses a divine shootout: “And just who are you? yelled Saul, / as someone zinged his Colt onto the ground, / reloaded, then slugged him six times in the chest. / Beloved, I’m the rustler of your heart of hearts.” In another section, Range explores power and violence through a series of poems written from the perspective of weapons. Questions about violence and its afterlife pervade her work; in “Force,” a poem dedicated to the memory of twentieth-century martyr Oscar Romero, the speaker remembers “The far-sighted priest stammering every name / of the disappeared—¡presente!—like it’s his own, / because it is.” In the collection’s introduction, poet Robert Fink (a former Image Artist of the Month) calls Range “a high and lonesome preacher with a pickaxe, priestess with a pike, prophet calling down avenging fire upon a water-soaked pyre”—and all that is true; but at times her poetry also sounds a quieter note. If you listen for it, there’s also a faint tambourine chime, a sense of jubilation, “that soaring / force that finds its power in adoring.”
Some of Range’s work is featured in Image issue 73. Read here.
Biography
Melissa Range’s first book of poems, Horse and Rider (Texas Tech University Press, 2010), won the 2010 Walt McDonald Prize in Poetry and was a runner-up for the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize. Range is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a “Discovery,” The Nation prize, and fellowships from Yaddo, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, The Georgia Review, The Hudson Review, Image, New England Review, The Paris Review, Subtropics, and other journals. Originally from East Tennessee, she’s finishing up her PhD in English at the University of Missouri.
Current Projects
September 2013
I am finishing up my second collection of poems, entitled Scriptorium. At the heart of this manuscript, which deals largely with medieval topics, is a sequence of sonnets about the pigments monks used in creating illuminated manuscripts. (Four of these sonnets appeared inImage 73.) In writing these sonnets, I was inspired not only by works of medieval religious art like the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells, but also by the fine tradition of religious sonneteers that begins with Donne and Herbert and extends to Hopkins, and, later, Mark Jarman and Geoffrey Hill. My own sonnet sequences address matters of belief and doubt, religious longing and disappointment, and religious sincerity and hypocrisy. Because I’m me, they ask many religious questions and answer none.
Other poems in Scriptorium, including the title poem (which appeared in Image 58) consider the interplay of standardized, “official” languages, and marginal, vernacular languages. These themes play out in the juxtaposition of Scholastic Latin and Old English, for example, in several of these poems. In others, I explore my own East Tennessee vernacular, digging deep into phrases like “flat as a flitter” and “crooked as a dog’s hind leg” to see what I can find at the core of the vibrant, slangy language I grew up with and still speak.
Backburner poetic projects include a long poem about East Tennessee and other Appalachian locales that I’ve been working on off and on for nearly a decade (with no finish line in sight, for I am slower than molasses in January) and a very new and very rough handful of historical poems I’ve started up about the abolitionist movement in the nineteenth century. We’ll see where these go!