Anne Whitehouse, Meteor Shower. 2016. Loveland, OH: Dos Madres Press. 86 pgs.
$17.00. ISBN: 978-1-939929-60-0
Meteor Shower
is a striking meditation on the passages of time and its connection with
creativity. The book is broken down into six distinct sections, and each seems
to entail an expansion or a broadening arc of concern and insight. In Section
I, “A Girl Who Fell in Love with an Island,” the reader moves through moments
trapped in time. I was drawn in by two
poems in particular here. “Fires of Youth” beautifully captures the essence of
the section: “And when the raising of our children is over,/ and they set out
on their own lives,/ we are aware of life passed as if in a dream--/our
mortality, our lost vitality.” There is a longing to return to still life
moments of the past, such as giving away dresses, filing away unreachable vacation
scenes and seeing yourself as a ghost at age 27. “One-Way Session” aptly captures a moment of
transition. It’s obvious there has been
the death of a trusted marriage therapist in the opening stanza. The speaker
senses: “From deep within/ I feel the release from/ that old way of being.”
Whitehouse moves the reader into a bleaker journey at this point. We sense a
break here coming, a movement into a difficult place of transition.
“The Eye That Cries” focuses on
mourning. It is a darker section of the
collection, almost as if the poet is leading us downward, in order to move us
upward as she proceeds. Poems here examine armed conflicts, suicides, and
elegies. Some of the lines are beautiful and haunting. In “Mother of Suicides,”
concerning mothers dealing with the deaths of children, the speaker seems to
cry out:
Worse
than the dread were the discoveries.
The
nightmares have never gone away:
What do you want from me?
You were the one who left—
Why won’t you let me go?
Whatever I did that was wrong,
I’m still paying for it.
The lines are painful, and like poems
such as “LOL,” they seem consumed with dread.
The image of the lost marriage returns in “My Last Spring in My House
and Garden.” The speaker recollects a
house she lived in for 35 years. The imagery is powerful and rooted. If she
could, she “…would slip/ into the soil like a buried seed.” The poem plays on
images of burial and uprooting. The speaker is blown far away from her home;
her life is split by her broken marriage “…not cleanly,/ but with spikes and
jagged edges.” It is poem of pain with the final image of the roots watered by
tears, evoking the deep sadness of lost love.
In Section III “Moving,” the reader
notices a subtle shift. Whitehouse seems to acknowledge loss, but there seems
to be acceptance, a conscious step away from images of paralysis and drift.
“Contraries” captures this well. It is a poem about recollecting a jellyfish’s
sting. The speaker’s sister never ventures back into the ocean after the
incident. The speaker insists on moving forward:
Just
imagine—not ever going under,
always
in air and not in water,
never
feeling the wonder
of
an alien element all around.
This captures a central idea in the
grouping. There’s an acknowledgement of pain, but there’s a building on it, a
movement forward. Two lines from “One Step Ahead” capture the sentiment as well:
“…trying to dodge the traps ahead/ while fleeing the terrors behind.” The final
poem of the section, “Delete, Delete,” portrays the everyday deletion of emails
as a metaphor for the choices of things we cut and avoid, in order to live more
fully in the present.
In Sections IV and V, (The Mask and Grout
Pond, respectively), I sense a shift into an almost-Zen appreciation of the
present moment. There seems to be more
balance in these poems. They appear more whimsical and less occupied with the
darkness of the past. For example, in “Less Impact,” we see this closing
stanza:
Relaxing
my grip
on
the things
of
the world,
I
feel myself
softening
into
the earth,
dissolving
into
the air.
There is a clear echo of the imagery of
Richard Wilbur’s poem, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” and yet
Whitehouse’s poem pushes readers into the air, into dissolution. The poems of “Grout Pond” continue to evoke
the present moment in shadows, dust motes, light and insects. They lead the
reader carefully into the final section of the collection, “Life’s Continuous
Chain.”
The sixth and final section of Meteor Shower contains some real gems,
which aptly close the arc of the book. “Calligraphies” and “Meteor Shower” are
two fine examples to note here. “Calligraphies” was awarded the 2016 Songs of Eretz poetry prize. It is a
persona poem about the speaker’s father collecting calligraphy in Quanzhou.
When revolution comes he buries and finally burns his collection. But he
continues to write calligraphy in the puddles on the ground. The poem contains
meditations on the infinite and the elusive power of language and art. Much of
it can be lost or remain invisible to the world. “Some mysteries are meant to
be discovered,/some are meant to remain heaven’s secrets.” The poem traces a
historical moment of conflict, but it shows the transcendent power to achieve
immortality. In “Meteor Shower,” Whitehouse closes the collection with creating
a simple, yet beautiful image of connection. “We,” perhaps the speaker and
reader together, stare up at the stars from a blanket. It’s a simple act,
filled with wonder, for as we look up at the dark, starry unknown, we seem to
better understand our selves and our purposes.
At
every instant we are
what
we have been and will be,
our
forebears who live on in us
we
remember, we resemble.
“Meteor Shower” closes with a unique
insight into the art of writing itself. “The deed was minimal, the words
exact,/ and I needed a lifetime to say them.” It’s a beautiful capturing of the
poet’s mission to observe and record minutely from a particular space in time,
with eyes ever upward on the infinite beyond our reach.
Meteor Shower is
truly a stunning and moving collection of poetry. The shifts from section to
section show a beautiful trajectory, down into memory and loss, back into
engagement with the present, and finally a movement upward towards transcendence
and infinity. The poems grapple, often intensely with loss and dislocation, and
yet there is a sense of purpose to the pain. As one line in “Creativity”
captures well about the collection as a whole: “An accident will lead you to
creation.” Yes, indeed, it does.
- Ian S. Maloney is Professor of English
at St. Francis College, where he directs the St. Francis College Literary
Prize.
Copyright©2017 by Ian S. Maloney
