We Lit the Lamps Ourselves

We Limp the Lamps Ourselves is the title of a new poetry book by Andrea Potos with more than one Brontë reference:

We Lit the Lamps Ourselves
By Andrea Potos
ISBN-13: 9781907056925
Published: Salmon Publishing, 5/2012

"Poets light but Lamps –/ Themselves – go out –," declared Emily Dickinson. Only those who burned with "vital Light" become a lens for the ages. The works of revered women writers, particularly the Brontë sisters, Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, have been such a lens for Andrea Potos. Her poems in this collection pursue the trail of creative genius in their lives.
These vibrant, impressionistic poems are haunted by lives long past whose voices still ring clear and strong. Celebrating the attending creative “presence of something more than myself,” they are “reminders/of what survives –/creation’s flames that gutter,/flare.”

This is a sample of the poems included in the book:

On the Moors, The Brontës 

Some shun it here–

call it tree-starved, stunted,

drizzled in mist.

In untrammeled air, curlews cry.

Over bilberry, gorse,

spikes of purple heather,

the earth is a bog that erupted one day–

under blackened skies, peat and mud flowed for miles, 

swept away bridges, suffocated fish.

(Papa preached that God unsheathed

his sword, brandished it over our heads.

Be thankful we are spared, he cried.)

Indeed, this ground is a living being

that breathes through our soles,

the air

an infinite undone page,

the wind the voice that dictates. 

You can read the poem Emily Dickinson and Emily Brontë here. The Wisconsin State Journal gives some more information:

Potos inhabits the literary heroines in works that expertly evoke the imagined emotions of these commanding voices. Take, for instance, the sisterly bond of the Brontës, conjured in “The Walking”:
Their father’s fear of fire/ makes carpet forbidden,/ they walk on bare stone./ Some would call it pacing,/ this circling/ the dining room table each night./ They link arms,/ tread this space/ (the way by heart),/reciting passages,/ plotting future chapters/ of their tales, the hours/ of eventless days. (Jeanne Kolker)