Mrs. Schmetterling by Robin Davidson

Robin Davidson’s Mrs. Schmetterling, a sequence of poems paired with and inspired by the stunning artwork of Sarah Fisher, brings us into the deeply personal yet universally relatable inner world of a woman questioning herself and her life with intelligence and fearlessness.

Mrs. Schmetterling is the continuation of a project Davidson began as a translator of the Polish poet Ewa Lipska, picking up the intimate conversations found in Lipska’s Dear Ms. Schubert, giving voice to a new protagonist. Mrs. Schmetterling joins the ranks of such classic literary figures as the talkative Mrs. Biswas of Reetika Vazirani’s White Elephants and Virginia Woolf’s forever anxious Mrs. Dalloway. She may well be a cousin to Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr. Cogito. Mrs. Schmetterling captures the spirit of a unique female voice in lines chiseled and shimmering.

Schmetterling, the German word for butterfly, signifies the Dadaist notion of beauty as accident, and was also the name given to an experimental German antiaircraft missle developed at the end of WWII. The added historical context behind this book draws the reader fully into the rich psyche Davidson has created, and puts a new spin on the idea of both illusion and the word made flesh.

“Robin Davidson brings an unusual sense of history, especially as it impacts women, into her own very American poetry. Her work is deeply engendered, and she writes of ordinary women—rooted in earth, reaching for light—caught between personal, social, and historical forces. She is a learned poet—her work rings with the work of photographers, painters, and other poets—who understands the work of poetry to bring light out of darkness and music out of silence. She is a poet of harsh luminosity, spiritual alertness, who has been growing into the fully realized artist she was always meant to become.”

— Edward Hirsch

“In Robin Davidson’s poems we hear the inner voice of someone who’s vulnerable and yet strong, introverted yet keenly observant-these are blessed tensions.”

— Adam Zagajewski