Word: donner
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AFTER TWO BOOKS of lyric poems, Ruth Whitman, a well-known New England poet, grew tired of the "subjective I." The Passion of Lizzie Borden was Whitman's first poem written from inside another woman. Tamsen Donner; a woman's journey is her second; and a third long poem from the point of view of a woman in the resistance during the Holocaust is underway...
Ruth Whitman, intermingling poetry and prose, tells Tamsen Donner's personal story, and creates a secular epic at the same time. The Donner party strikes out for California in 1846 for "fun" and meets tragedy. The end is not sudden, but is the slow unloading of the baggage of the old life. "George lifts my heavy crate of Shakespeare... and hides it in a hill of salt," and the old identity...
...second two sections of the book record the changes, spiritual and material, that Tamsen undergoes. While the trip begins as a metaphoric uniting of the continent, comparable to Tamsen's second marriage to George Donner--"and I who started/a thousand miles before/feel in my flesh/the stretch of the land/as we give it birth"--it unfolds as a series of losses, of partings. "Now hesitant among the mountains/we pass across the invisible boundary/that divides self from self..." The last and most painful parting for Tamsen, is her husband's death. She therefore chooses to die in the mountains, with...
...Tamsen Donner's thoughts unfold subtly, over the thousands of miles that she journeys. All of the particulars of her honest, direct entries seem to elevate her to a principle. As Ruth Whitman has intended: "I thought of the journey in its literal sense as a typical American sequence, moving from innocence to disaster; and as a woman's history, moving from dependence to courageous selfhood." (quoted from Radcliffe Quarterly...
Whitman became interested in pioneer life through a larger interest in mortality and survival. She chose Tamsen Donner partly because of their similarities: both poets, teachers and married more than once. Through reading numerous accounts of the Donner party trip, and by traveling the route herself, Whitman hoped to get inside her persona...