Lost Horse Press, Paperback, 78 pages. $18.00.<\/p>\n
Reviewed by Melissa Kwasny<\/p>\n
Poetry has been described as the art of speaking the unspeakable. In some cases, the unspeakable is that which seems almost too horrific to put into words. Sometimes it is that the state of being is too nuanced, the feeling too fleeting, the insight too gossamer for most of us to register it. Sometimes the silence comes from whole ranges of experience previously unexplored or thought unfit. Women poets, for instance, in the 1970s and \u201880s, legitimized abortion, childbirth, and menstruation as worthwhile subjects for poetry. Upon reading Tami Haaland\u2019s new book, What Does Not Return<\/em>, it occurs to me that what has been rarely explored in poetry is the daily care and burden that (mostly) women assume for the ill and the dying. And that is why this quietly revolutionary book of poetry seems so essential.<\/p>\n Most of the poems in Haaland\u2019s book reference her mother\u2019s dementia and eventual death, and the years of care-giving the author devoted to her. How does one bear witness to the messiness of managing someone else\u2019s care\u2014the impatience and patience, the enormous weight one lifts physically, emotionally, and financially, the day by day demands on one\u2019s resources, the admixture of love and grief: \u201c[M]other has gone into her room \/ where I\u2019ve turned down her blanket so she \/ doesn\u2019t sleep on top and tonight I don\u2019t \/ stand a chance of getting her \/ into pajamas.\u201d What does caregiving feel<\/em> like? What of the twin pulls of generosity and miserliness of spirit? \u201cIt was a year and a mile, a daily escape, \/ a treat, a burden, a weight,\u201d Haaland writes of her mother\u2019s decline. \u201cWhat a place,\u201d she exclaims about visiting her mother in the nursing home she has finally moved her into, meaning not only the room but where they both together find themselves. How to manage dementia \u201cas if she could \/ still manage once time had disappeared\u201d?<\/p>\n Haaland\u2019s poems are affectingly simple in diction and style. It is an appropriate, impressive simplicity, sharpened as it is by emotional honesty and the courage to stare unflinchingly at the painful reality of loss. In \u201cTwo Eggs,\u201d the mother smiles proudly at her feat of perfectly breaking the eggs into a bowl: \u201cShe has made two eggs as she did \/ when she knew what to do.\u201d In this image, the daughter and mother, making a pudding, perhaps a cake, adding milk before it goes into the oven, I am reminded of how my own grandmother dying in the hospital made the motions of peeling potatoes with her beautifully ordinary hands. This is what the attendant knows: the body\u2019s memories are the last to go.<\/p>\n The language here is painstakingly precise, as if clarity were essential to preserving dignity and privacy\u2014and then the heart breaks as one clear line shatters us: \u201cThe dog is near. We think she might like \/ to see it once more.\u201d Clearly, the dog that once was the mother\u2019s lives apart from her now. Clearly that \u201conce more\u201d is more a given than a premonition. Clearly, bringing the dog to see the mother is the most anyone can do, and one is not sure it will suffice. However, these are not dark poems but poems suffused with light. They are poems that return poignancy and beauty to the perceived ugliness of dying, the perceived sacrifice of care-giving: \u201cI vote we keep going, head west, wash her feet one last time in the tide. \/\/ She says no, she wants her dinner.\u201d When the mother does die, the daughter stands in the dark and empty hospital room sketching her mother\u2019s face, waving off the comfort and company from the nurses: \u201cThe hospice woman thought \/ she was helping, that her words \/ would be a comfort in a room full of death, \/ but I turned away to the weighted silence \/ the slow cooling and loss.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAt Laguna, when someone dies, you don\u2019t \u2018get over it\u2019 by forgetting; you \u2018get over it\u2019 by remembering<\/em>, and by remembering you are aware that no person is ever truly lost or gone once they have been in our lives,\u201d writes the novelist Leslie Marmon Silko in a letter to her friend James Wright. The starkness and emptiness of the Montana prairie, where Haaland grew up and where her mother spent her life, which the poet has always described well, are evident, but there is a new depth\u2014and distance\u2014seen through the lens of memory. In \u201cScandinavians on the High Plains,\u201d the poet describes her mother\u2019s reluctance to take a pleasure trip to a nearby lake, she who was always \u201c looking perpetually for more work,\u201d though the children yearn for the joy it might bring: \u201cWe watched the pattern of waves \/ rise and fall behind us \/ until we were at ease.\u201d She remembers her mother\u2019s glass vases \u201cfilled \/ with ripe grasses \/ we found in a ditch,\u201d so fragile, so ready to tip, \u201cas if in this world to walk heavily \/ were not allowed.\u201d The mother\u2019s spare, workaday existence stands in direct contrast to the daughter, who will paint her house blue, and who \u201cdoesn\u2019t care for tame.\u201d<\/p>\n This brings me to one of the most surprising\u2014and surprisingly successful\u2014turns in the book\u2019s trajectory. In the last section, entitled \u201cNo Reason to Stay Inside,\u201d as well as in a scattering of poems that precede it, Haaland\u2019s proximity to her mother\u2019s death, rather than bringing about only grief, guilt, and sorrow, which is so often the case, also inexplicably opens a door to the magical, to wonder, even to the supernatural. In \u201cGift,\u201d her mother leads her to a secret cabinet and a gift of glass slippers painted with galloping white horses. In \u201cBlue Moon,\u201d one of my favorite poems, the daughter walking at night encounters a deer: \u201cSo much velvet\u2014to invite you seems \/ inevitable. \/\/ What is the chance a woman might walk \/ with a deer \/\/ on this border of pavement?\u201d In \u201cNight Journey,\u201d the author is on a train, watching people in the dining car being served melon and drinks: \u201cFar ahead rode my mother \/ and father. Though I hadn\u2019t seen them, \/ I knew we were traveling \/together, and I had the most ordinary \/ thought, that I would go to them.\u201d<\/p>\n The contemporary Syrian poet Adonis, in differentiating poetry from other written or oral forms, writes that it is a language of love rather than a language of explanation: \u201cThe former loves things without necessarily understanding them, while the relationship of [the latter] to things and the universe is one of understanding, knowing and valuation rather than love. Love itself is not expressed but experienced.\u201d I would like to venture that poetry allows us to experience the unspeakable\u2014including the dead who can no longer speak\u2014because the language of love is an interior language, one kept alive by memories and dreams. In Haaland\u2019s dream poems, presented without explanation or interpretation, the dead enter as naturally and unremarkably as she might enter into her mother\u2019s kitchen for supper. Because of the quotidian nature of the previous poems, their specificity and sense of place, we accept these experiences and are, as we sense she must be, healed by them.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Lost Horse Press, Paperback, 78 pages. $18.00. Reviewed by Melissa Kwasny Poetry has been described as the art of speaking the unspeakable. In some cases, the unspeakable is that which seems almost too horrific to put into words. 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