Jane Satterfield

Jane Satterfield, among her other works has immortalized the Brontes, most beloved writers of the 1800's: Charlotte, Emily, Anne—in brisk witty verse using all the ways we hold art: cento, ekphrastic, sestina, epistolary, etc. She writes also of Jane Eyre and Virginia Woolf. Satterfield's forms allow this poet a high wire act, enabling biography in precise detail, creating a world fully alive. Women in history are not her only gifts, it is language itself—carefully woven, brilliantly imagistic where poetic information becomes lace. —Grace Cavalieri

Jane Satterfield was born in Corby, England to an American airman and a British mother. Her most recent books are The Badass Brontës (a Diode Editions winner, 2023) and Apocalypse Mix (Autumn House Prize, 2017). Earlier books include Her Familiars, Assignation at Vanishing Point (Elixir Press Poetry Award), and Shepherdess with an Automatic (Towson University Prize). With Laurie Kruk, she co-edited the multi-genre anthology Borderlands and Crossroads: Writing the Motherland. A National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellow, Satterfield has received several Maryland Arts Council grants, while individual poems have won Bellingham Review’s 49th Parallel Poetry Prize and awards from the Ledbury Festival and Mslexia magazine (both U.K.-based). She has received fellowships from the Arvon Foundation (U.K.), the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Sewanee. Satterfield has served on the faculty of the West Chester Poetry Conference, the Frost Farm Conference, and as the 2019 Salisbury, Maryland Poet-in-Residence. She is married to poet Ned Balbo and lives in Baltimore, where she is a professor of writing at Loyola University Maryland. For more, visit https://janesatterfield.org

Going Solo with Jane Eyre

Zara Rutherford, a Belgian-British aviator, flew solo around the globe from August 2021 to January 2022, the youngest female pilot to achieve this record. She carried a gift copy of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre for entertainment along the way.

Who could blame a girl for wanting more?
Ambition meant breaking records in an ultralight
I’d pilot through sixty stops across
five continents, armed with an extended
playlist & extra can of fuel. I skirted storms
and walls of wildfire smoke, had setbacks
& delays—jammed landing gear, the lightning
strike, the canopy that tore straight through
when the winds hit hurricane force.
Jane, like you, I’ve learned
that harm comes in some collision of weather
& pilot error—like a selfish rake’s wedding
that set you on that wild romp through
the moors. The heart’s a handy gauge
in heady altitudes. I thought of you
while floating over vibrant blues
of tropical seas—a convergence zone
I passed through in a patch of calm.
Later, when language failed me,
I ended up alone, ice-fishing the frozen north.
Hunkered down, I hoped you’d leap off
those well-thumbed pages to join me
as I lifted off above icebergs
in a winter sky, steering that trusty craft
straight through a horizon hung with emerald light.

Divination: Haworth Parsonage, 184-

Weird Sisters at Top Withens: Emily, Charlotte, and Anne Brontë

We were motherless. Our elder sisters
and their tales had gone dark also

in early death. Thereafter, grief and uncanny luck
sealed our triad, sparked our tongues

to language. At first it was a game,
a whirl of words
to conjure continents, the ruler queens

and renegades who were the voices
in our heads. Later,

we learned to read the blasted heath,
grew wild at sums and spells, gathered

hawkbit, daisy, herbal messengers
meticulous as sundials.
And we were game, conjuring page after page,

of storms or summoned calm, wayward plots
and willful women
who outsmarted traps and snares. They broke free

to live hereafter. As we did,
for a time.
The moor’s a feral space of gritstone,

but our sisterhood did work some healing magic.

Note: A four mile walk from Haworth, Yorkshire, Top Withens is a ruined farmhouse sometimes thought to be the inspiration for Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. As Sarah Hughes notes, “…[T]here’s something almost mythical about the Brontë creation story, the idea of these three isolated young women writing so desperately that the words were almost flung on to the page. Ted Hughes called them the ‘three weird sisters’, intentionally summoning Macbeth’s blasted heath to Haworth parsonage.” (“Why those subversive Brontë sisters still hypnotise us,” The Guardian, March 26, 2016)

Constellations of the Bear

The Maryland Zoo in Baltimore

June and the zoo’s gates
clank open wide.
We weave past pink
flamingo flash, the waterfall

that topples penguins into dives.
Last night, you squinted past
the town’s encroaching lights
to map the figure of the Bear.

Here we pause behind a pane,
smudged safety glass that screens us
from the wild.
Hanging
at eye-level, a scrawled sign

states: The bears may come out
or stay in. It’s their choice. Brew Fest
bands are warming up, booming
drums and bass. Guests pass by,

retreat, or rap the panes, phones
raised to stream a moment’s memory.

One bear drifts toward a rocky den;
the other treads a single path,

pivot of paw and heel along
the small hill shaping this exhibit—
a grassy stretch and stand of oaks
half the size of our townhouse block,

far cry from his kin’s ancestral
range. Head down, the bear speed-shuffles,
turns and returns to plow a steady
figure-eight, paws lifting drifts

of dirt.
We see too much—
too little—the bear’s fur,
russet-tinged, burnished in the humid air—

the meme a mind becomes.

Moths in Midsummer

In some dreams, summer never dies
& moths dodge woven webs to hover
over pasture dark, or settle here, outside
a barn studio, framed in a field of light.
Their scaled wings, doused in pollen,
bring nightshades & orchards
to blossom, pale as torn paper
or butterfly-bright. Once, Virginia Woolf
smoothed marbled paper over worn
volumes of Shakespeare, wrapping
the spines in an eclipse of wings, a dazzle
of cool camouflage over the shelves.
The dream’s prophecy says keep moths
in mind—a mantra for the coming days.
In some dreams, the window between
silver-blue dusk & dark, between moth-light
& moonlight, stays open, before the praying
mantis arrives, before the season slips
southward, & grass begins to brown.

For an Emergence of Wonder

Rinsed skies and the chilled strawberry of the new moon—
Small bats unfurl between stands of oak and maple that rim the playing fields—

And because the models are many, at first I think he’s miming
anger or outrage, but the small child on the corner I’ve dodged
waves to call out the magic he’s found—firefly, lightning bug,

a luminescence that lifts from his upheld palm, an ember in the shifting light.

For Preservation

Dusk and the song sparrow’s loop of love notes rings through
the full canopies, the dieback branches. Storm watches, storm

warnings, a scatter of shells, cracked teal. Those playing cards
slipped between an oak’s loose bark—a wild design you didn’t know you needed.
So walk

a little further to where the green-goldlights rise from grass, wind shadow, leaf litter, furrow—
the small glen alive with the cold light of their moving script.