NEW YORK — Cynthia Macdonald, whose idiosyncratic blend of humor and the grotesque made her a distinctive voice on America’s poetry scene, died Aug. 3 in a nursing home in Logan, Utah.
She was 87.
The cause was heart failure, her daughter, Jennifer, said.
Ms. Macdonald’s first volume of poetry, “Amputations,” published in 1972, introduced readers to the dark fun house of her imagination, populated by freaks and misfits whose harrowing circumstances she described with a light touch and verbal inventiveness. “When he cut off his feet I knew he was leaving,” the mother in “Departure” announces calmly, treating her son’s act of self- mutilation as a natural stage on the road to independence.
In her third collection, “(W)holes,” published in 1980, she described “the world’s fattest dancer,” fed on chocolates and “larded guinea hens,” twirling for the public’s amusement: “Whoever dances with her, she is the biggest attraction.”
Later works adopted a more somber tone in dealing with a wider range of subjects, notably the crises and abandonments in the dark psychological tales of “I Can’t Remember” (1997).
“People forget their children in the strangest places,” the poem “Casual Neglects” begins. “Crossing Fifth in front of Saks, Little Jane/left behind.” It concludes: “The air is absent-minded/and the empty sky of Paradise is pocked with small pink shells,/those baby fingernails which couldn’t quite keep holding on.”
Cynthia Lee was born in Manhattan.
Her father, Leonard, was a screenwriter whose credits included “Dressed to Kill” and other Sherlock Holmes films. Her mother, Dorothy Kiam, was a daughter of Houston clothier Edward Kiam. Ms. Macdonald received an English degree from Bennington College in 1950.
She studied voice at the Mannes School of Music in Manhattan and embarked on an opera career as a soprano.
In 1954 she married Elmer Cranston Macdonald, a Shell Oil executive, known as Mac, whose postings in cities around the world — including a three-year stint in Tokyo — made it impractical for his wife to continue her musical career. But she performed on Canadian television when he was working in Vancouver and in the early 1960s was among the winners of the San Francisco Opera’s open auditions. The marriage ended in divorce. In addition to her daughter, Jennifer, who in the 1990s produced installation art in partnership with Hillary Leone, Ms. Macdonald leaves a son, Scott, and a grandchild.
Ms. Macdonald turned her full attention to poetry in the mid-1960s. Her early efforts were encouraged by Anne Sexton, a poet with a similar sense of humor and power to shock.
“In both cases, a light sardonic touch is used for poetic aims of the utmost seriousness,” poet Hayden Carruth wrote in a review of Ms. Macdonald’s second volume of poetry, “Transplants,” in The New York Times Book Review in 1976.
Ms. Macdonald returned to school, earning a master’s degree in writing and literature from Sarah Lawrence College in 1970. She taught writing at Sarah Lawrence and Johns Hopkins University before founding, with poet Stanley Plumly, the creative writing program at the University of Houston, where she was a director for many years and taught poetry. She retired in 2004.
She trained as a Freudian psychoanalyst at the Houston-Galveston Psychoanalytic Institute, becoming certified in 1986. She later joined the faculty there. As a practitioner, she specialized in treating patients with writer’s block.
“All people who really want to write and can’t, or who really need to write and can’t, have real conflict and real oppositions,” she told The Houston Chronicle in 1998. “One part of them is saying you have to do this, you want to do this, and the other part is saying you’re not allowed to.”
In addition to the poetry collections “Pruning the Annuals” (1976) and “Living Wills” (1991), Ms. Macdonald wrote the libretto for Thomas Benjamin’s opera “The Rehearsal” and the lyrics for the Judy Collins song “This Is the Day.”