Praise for Selected Poems
“Jeremy Ingalls (1911-2000) was a metaphysical modernist, a formalist who worked to reconcile the tradition of fixed-form poetry with the imperative for invention. She was a scholar of world mythology and literature, and a woman committed to a poetics of psychic event and social force. From a twentieth-century anxiety about the increasing scale of violence and tyranny, and the loss of shared identity that political upheaval induces. . . Ingalls saw the mission of poetry as an aesthetic, formal, and moral challenge.” —Alison Hawthorne Deming
Excerpt from Selected Poems
To Signal How We Know
Our local rosy finch ascending solo from this garden
Each noonday perches comfortably secure
Upon our alley phone-poles highest wire.
We dare assume he rests there unaware
Of messages that surge along the wire he rests upon.
Other messages there are that also can transpire
Wordless and with not one outward sign
To signal what to us is known and how we surely know.
Securely we rejoice in sharing all those moments when
Your eyes salute my eyes in one shared glow.
Jeremy Ingalls was born Mildred Dodge Jeremy Ingalls in Massachusetts in 1911. She received Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Tufts University and was a scholar of Chinese and English literature. She was for some years Resident Poet, Professor of Asian Studies, and later head of the English Department at Rockford College. She also taught at Western College in Ohio.
