On Recollecting

These songs were commissioned by the Mohawk Trail Concerts in Charlemont, Massachusetts in honor of Ruth Lloyd Black, their co-founder. The first performance was on August 30, 2015, soon after her death. My recollections of Ruth over some sixty years of friendship were a mixture of laughter and tears. She was a tireless advocate of chamber music, a fine musician, and possessor of a delightfully British sense of humor. Emily Dickinson has her tongue firmly in her cheek in these poems. There is serious purpose under the lyrics, but the surface is pure word-play. She juggles the terms “forgetting” and “recollecting” in each poem until they almost take each other’s meaning. The firstpoem may have accompanied a gift of flowers to a grieving neighbor: she shares the grief, but assuages it with humor. The first statement of “blithe” fingers should be happy, the second drenched in sorrow. I love the way the second poem opens like a puzzle: is she forgetting to remember, or remembering to forget? In either case, it ends with the touching image of a lost child. She continues to confuse us in the third song: is it sunrise or sunset that is “the other one?” The setting sun is her subject in many wonderful poems: here, she would rather “die divinely” in glorious color (echoes of Sarah Bernhardt?) than merely wane away. -Alice Parker