but the slow stretch of Sundays lost pouring
milk for us children, coffee for them,
and at game time, National Premium.”
— Moira Egan, “An Elegy for Johnny Unitas,” for her mother, Betty
Energizing the national poetry scene with inventive and erotic work, Baltimore poet Moira Egan, 46, has emerged as a powerful new voice in American poetry.
A double sonnet entitled “Millay Goes Down” recently appeared in the “The Best American Poetry 2008” collection, a distinguished honor for any poet.
“Egan can retain the sonnet structure and adapt it to the speech and behavior of our own day,” said the collection’s editor, David Lehman. “That is impressive, not least because her writing communicates pleasure to even the untutored reader.”
The collection was guest-edited by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Wright and includes the work of established poets Carolyn Forche, Paul Muldoon, Jorie Graham, Louise Glck, Philip Levine and Charles Simic.
“I was thrilled to be chosen by someone as eminent as Charles Wright,” said Egan, whose “Millay” sonnets had appeared in the prestigious literary journal Prairie Schooner.
“I found her two sonnets both naughty and nice,” said Wright.
Egan worked for many years on the manuscript until her first book of poems, “Cleave,” was published in 2004 and nominated for the National Book Award.
She grew up in Catonsville, the daughter of Michael and Betty Egan, and attended Archbishop Keough High School, where she published her first poems and edited “Chimera,” the school’s literary journal.
Egan taught at University of Maryland, Baltimore County during the 1970s, but it was while attending Columbia University’s MFA program that her father died of cancer. “I found my poems among his papers, very gently blue-lined, a comment here, a suggestion there, but he hadn’t sent them back to me,” she said.
Egan’s scholarly path included Bryn Mawr College, where she graduated in 1985; Columbia University, 1992; and Johns Hopkins University, where she earned an MFA in the Writing Seminars. At Columbia, she won the David Craig Austin Prize awarded by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Merrill.
Egan writes poems about sex, Godiva chocolate, punk rock, pumps and fishnet stockings — all of which take risks and unabashedly explore the possibilities of language.
She wrote “An Elegy for Johnny Unitas,” in slant-rhymed couplets, each of which has 19 syllables.
“On the day [Unitas] died, I saw that my mother was sad beyond the death of a football star,” said Egan. “I understood immediately that it signaled the passing of an entire era, when my family was intact and everyone was still alive.”
A new era began for her a few years ago when she met epidemiologist Damiano Abeni — a prolific poet and translator of contemporary American poetry. They married last year and reside in Rome, where they are working on several projects together including a translation of John Ashbery’s poems.
“She is quite simply one of the most gifted poets around, period,” said Clarinda Harriss, a professor of English at Towson University. “She’s finally getting the recognition she deserves.”
Even in Rome she misses the city where she grew up.
“Baltimore appreciates its own funky charm and doesn’t want to be grander than it is,” Egan said. “And how can you not love a town that names its pro football team after a poem?”
