January Gill O’Neil has worked hard to get where she is today.
The associate professor of English at Salem State University discusses that reality in a poem, “I Slept in John Grisham’s Bed,” which recalls the year she spent from 2019 to 2020 as the John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi.
The appointment included residence in a home once owned by Grisham, the best-selling author of legal thrillers who attended the University of Mississippi and whose former bed has “a well/in the center I’d always roll into.”
“I worked hard to earn that bed/and the room surrounding it,” O’Neil writes. “Meaning,/I must have written words, once,/That meant something.”
The poet imagines Grisham’s life in that house, and other people who have held the fellowship he bestowed, and she even starts to think “big thoughts” about “time travel or black holes.”
But the comfortable bed that served as a symbol of how far she has come also reminded O’Neil that the work of writing is never done, whenever she saw “the bed’s blank page against the shimmer of skyglow.”
The poem appears in “Glitter Road,” O’Neil’s fourth book, which is being released on Tuesday, Feb. 6.
She will read from the new work on Tuesday, Feb. 13, at Endicott College and on Thursday, Feb. 22, at Copper Dog Books, both in Beverly, and at other locations listed at www.januarygilloneil.com/events.
“This book is a little bit of a natural progression from ‘Rewilding’ (published in 2018), where I’m centered in my life, and have this wonderful opportunity to go to Mississippi,” O’Neil said. “I also fell in love down there.”
Readers of O’Neil’s previous work, which also includes “Underlife” from 2009 and “Misery Islands” from 2014, will recognize themes relating to personal relationships, the natural world and race.
They will also encounter meditative lyrics alongside found poems, poems written in unique or experimental forms and poems that turn on the multiple meanings of single words.
“I enjoy looking at the same six or seven subjects, and how they change over time,” O’Neil said. “How I looked at love in my thirties is different from now. I enjoy the challenge—I used to look at this differently, and how can I express it? How can I go deeper, at this point of my life, with craft and style?”
While Mississippi is the focus of many poems in “Glitter Road,” the book opens with several poems that remember the death of O’Neil’s ex-husband on the North Shore in 2016.
“Autopsy,” a poem about this bitter ending that is ironically placed at the book’s beginning, recalls the scientific measurements in which her ex-husband’s death was recorded on a form.
But it is also an autopsy that O’Neil performs on her own emotions, after remembering that she once told her ex-husband that he’d be dead in five years, “and I was right.”
While the poem describes this as an “awful thing that people say/when they can’t hear their own joy,” she also says that she has already forgiven herself for saying it.
But the end of the poem provides an irony of its own, by revealing a sense of renewal in O’Neil’s need to remember.
“This is not an elegy or an apology,/The lungs taking in too much water—/this is a memory coming up for air,” she writes.
The poems in this section give a personal twist to some of those set in Mississippi, which are scattered throughout the book.
While O’Neil said her time at the University of Mississippi was a “great year,” personally and professionally, her visit there also exposed her directly to some facts of southern history.
“I often describe Mississippi as not what you would expect, but also exactly what you would expect,” she said.
One poem, “Rowan Oak,” is about a dinner at the former home of Nobel Prize-winning Mississippi novelist William Faulkner, and is prefaced with one of his most famous statements, “The past is never dead. It’s never past.”
O’Neil describes southern history as sitting “in plain view,” which is evident from the living quarters of Faulkner’s “mammy” on the grounds of his estate, and the memorial for Emmett Till in Glendora, Mississippi.
While the presence of that memorial suggests a healthy reckoning with the past, when African American Till was brutally murdered in 1955 by white men for allegedly flirting with a white woman, the sign’s own history suggests that some things haven’t changed.
“There have been signs before,/three: stolen, shot-up, tossed in the river,” the last one standing for just 35 days before it was replaced with a bulletproof marker that weighs 500 pounds, O’Neil writes in “At the Rededication of the Emmett Till Memorial, Glendora, MS.”
Consolations for this conflict are hard to find, even in the landscapes and natural creatures that O’Neil loves to explore.
But an epigraph from another Black, female poet, Toi Derricotte, which stands at the beginning of “Glitter Road,” suggests another life-giving resource at O’Neil’s disposal, along with memory: “Joy is an act of resistance.”
It’s a joy that O’Neil records in the poem “Cartwheel,” which suggests the pleasures of poetry that she brings to readers, while also celebrating a physical feat.
“That I go through the turn/and keep landing on my feet/is a goddamn miracle,” O’Neil writes.