The telling phrase, casually employed, is a fair indication of a poet’s worth, so when leafing through Habitats and chancing on a nicely judged poem describing a long-sought peace only achieved when
The day for once bore
no schisms, no battering-rammed doors leaned
askew on their hooks.
I knew I was in good hands. Even more so when coming across the fine simile at the end of the piece – “A forest carries quiet / like cloth in its arms...” – which prompted in me the suggestion of a kind of serenity, an echo of stillness rarely allowed us.
It’s what Katharine Whitcomb does, slipping in under the radar such carefully expressed imagery in this, her third full-length collection, after Saints of South Dakota & Other Poems, and The Daughter’s Almanac. In a series of largely first-person narratives dealing with everyday concerns and blessings, personal interaction and encounters with the natural world, we are presented with poems both colourfully detailed and surprisingly revealing. They let us in on a gallery of nicely drawn experiences bolstered by the addition of an acute observation here, a thoughtful coda there, and the presence of a sympathetic individual ethos linking all the disparate parts.
A variation of verse forms, some relatively conventional, some experimental almost, are called on to convey more effectively the author’s intention. These include a couple of prose poems, one of which I considered particularly touching; a piece whose assured but delicate handling I found quite remarkable. “Along the Narrow Road Some Sunlight” opens with the six members of staff in a flower shop laughing amongst the roses and the gerbera daisies, where “...Their shop feels like somebody’s kitchen after / the screen door has banged & they say oh it’s you, friend. Come in. Leave / the biting wind outside...”, and goes on to paint a sensitive picture of confused and agitated mourners struggling with the right words for the cards accompanying their funeral wreaths. Then, out of the blue as it were, we are transported back in time to the Paris of the nineteen-twenties and the installation in a museum of Monet’s Water Lilies, his magnificent symbol of peace which surrounds the public “in an aquarium / of flowers and water…”. Returning to the present day, and the same museum is infested with visitors wielding selfie sticks making their very own movies; but a man, a war veteran presumably, begins to shed tears, and rather than ignore this open display of grief they all begin to weep along with him among the shimmering blooms. The concluding lines take us back again to the flower shop where an old song plays over the sound system, and all
the flower women
sing along raising their heads
to us in greeting.
I’ve quoted freely from this poem, for which I make no apology. In a way, it really shouldn’t work: you might think it would jar somehow; that the time-shifts might appear as an easy conceit; that sentimentality might be seen to seep in; but the fact is it does work. It works beautifully.
In the poem “Habitat” a suppressed accumulation of loneliness and the perceived shame of a broken relationship finally explodes in a prolonged existential scream when trying to position a washer/dryer into a small house; whilst in “Trail”, being confronted with a young bear prompts the uneasy suspicion that a fiercely protective mother probably isn’t too far away. A celebration of the indestructability of the snowberry – a shrub that “holds up hillsides in their root nets” is pleasingly lyrical, and a single forsythia bush newly leafed after the drought is an item included in a brightly positive poem listing a countdown of blessings to change your luck. These examples, picked pretty much at random, are testament to the expansive range of a poet able to express with disarming clarity the highs and the lows, and who delights in possibility; in the potential latent in the commonplace, the less-considered.
There is much of value to be unearthed elsewhere from a collection covering a lot of ground, and in limited space I can only bring to light a few examples. One which I feel can’t be left out, if only because of its universal relevance, is “After Apple Picking”, an accomplished piece detailing the shared grief of the poet and her 92-year-old father. Separated by three time zones, he is in a nursing home where he queues with the others for dinner at 4.45, struggles to walk in a straight line and sometimes forgets to get into the bed at night. It’s an existence where it’s “Hard to even look at the calendar / when the days slam down all the same...”, and where answering the telephone is a trial. For her part, for self-preservation more than anything, all she can do is bend her head and conjure a vision of him as:
a young man running beside my bike,
& before that, the younger man strolling
in Boston, handsome as a candidate,
wearing loafers, cigarette in hand.
It’s a vision easily imagined as a couple of photographs from the family album, a little creased perhaps, with a faded inscription neatly written in ballpoint pen on the back.
I also liked very much the poet’s tale of her relationship with a patronising triathlete dentist with a nervous dog and hard cyclist’s thighs. Her gentle take-down of this narcissistic bore whose fondness for psychobabble and rough sex seemed to have unaccountably lost its appeal, is a lovely touch. And “Greenland, 1350” is a fairy tale of a poem intricately woven and with an indefinable charm all its own.
I must also give special mention to “Poem for the Day the World Will End”, which is the concluding piece in the collection, and a worthy finale it is too. It might be described as a sort of literary still-life or a self-portrait with fruit, and after several readings I’m not sure which, but either way it’s typically individual in both form and content, and is a very fine picture of the poet in an idealized setting. A poet practised in her art; a poet able to sympathetically and skilfully lay before us the intricacies, the joys and the downright bloody messiness of being, as Habitats so manifestly demonstrates.
Robert Dunsdon is from Abingdon in the UK. His poetry has been published in Ambit, Allegro, The Crank, Candelabrum, The Cannon’s Mouth, Decanto, Pennine Platform, Picaroon, Purple Patch and others. His book reviews have featured in Tupelo Quarterly, Heavy Feather Review, The Lit Pub, Sugar House Review, Colorado Review, Los Angeles Review and Poetry International.