Carla Drysdale. Inheritance. Finishing Line Press, 2016. 29 pgs. $14.49.

Reviewed by Lynn Domina

We might be entering a new age of the chapbook, just as we’re entering (I think) a new age of the prose poem. Dozens of presses are now publishing chapbooks, and writers who’ve published multiple full-length collections are embracing the form, often for projects well-suited to this publishing mode, sequences of related poems, for example, that gain substance from being published together without the context of additional unrelated poems. Although poets still often begin their careers with chapbooks, the form, in currently appealing to established poets also, is redefining itself and elevating its prestige.  Finishing Line Press is no longer an upstart as small presses go—it’ll celebrate its twentieth anniversary in two years—and it specializes in the chapbook, publishing multiple titles each year. It has become, in fact, one of the most influential chapbook publishers in the country. Carla Drysdale’s Inheritance is her first chapbook, but it follows a full-length collection, Little Venus, which was published in 2009. The poems included in Inheritance are thematically linked, as the speaker considers the lives of her children and her parents. The content is often difficult, but Drysdale is able to articulate strong emotion by recollecting it, if not exactly in tranquility, then with measured concern.

The opening poem, for instance, which is also the title poem, explores her two sons’ differences which align them with her in distinctive ways. The poem intensifies as its proceeds, until what’s most surprising is also what’s most unsettling. The opening lines are straightforward, and the tone seems calm, nearly objective, but it is also deceptive:

One of my two sons devours books
as I did, bespectacled, silent.

There are childhood facts I’d like to check,
but the past is unpopular

with my mother. Her husband wasn’t a reader.
His eye was on me during the day

and at night,…

The transition from assurance to ominous occurs already in the second couplet, which—through Drysdale’s line break—initially seems to refer to the son. Readers are startled, then, at the introduction of the mother, and slightly uneasy therefore with the husband who “wasn’t a reader.” Drysdale exploits her options with the line again between couplets two and three: “during the day // and at night,…” The poem narrates the speaker’s experiences with her mother and stepfather and then turns again, at the 2/3 mark, to discuss the “other son.” He

peers into

the legacy behind my eyes,
at what I’m trying to hide.

His pleasure and pain
are always mine

as when he kisses his cat or bends
his pen in half and yells at me,

enraged by the words
on the page.

This son initially seems empathic and affectionate, and again meaning bends across the turn of the line break. He “bends,” not for a hug or caress, but to break the pen that won’t properly write the words he can’t properly read. Superficially, this son is the opposite of the first who “devours books,” but this son is devoured by inarticulate rage, just as the speaker is as she recalls the actions of her stepfather and the inaction of her mother. The sons, by responding to print as differently as they do, create a composite of their mother’s apparent and hidden character. Drysdale, in choosing the restraint of couplets and the flexibility of the enjambed line, permits the poem to reveal rather than to declare its meaning.

Many of the poems in Inheritance work similarly, including the final poem, “Rafael’s Question,” which is also composed in couplets and also concerns the speaker’s position generationally between her sons and her parents. This poem imagistically and thematically links the chapbook’s end to its beginning, but now there’s an implication of reconciliation with the events life has brought rather than rage at them. The son’s final question regarding his grandparents is poignant—“He asks, ‘Do you still love them?’ / So gently, so gently”—because it’s ultimately a question about whether the speaker’s ability or inability to love as a daughter will be replicated in her ability or inability to love as a mother.

Formally, the most unusual poem in the collection is “Labyrinth,” which relies on anaphora to establish a chant-like rhythm through the first half. These stanzas describe the speaker’s mother’s protection:

She who bore me, supported my slack newborn neck
in her palm while she bathed me in a small basin,
warm water tested on her wrist

At exactly the half-way point, though, the tone and content shift:

Who covered me up in the sun, but neglected the darkness
I was in…

There is no more “She who” protects the speaker, but lines like this: “Abandonment, it sounds so harsh, then and now, / well, doesn’t it?” If it sounds harsh, it is because maternal abandonment is harsh. The final stanza describes the speaker’s relationship with her mother as a “labyrinth of denial”—complicated denial, for its unclear whether it’s established by the mother or by the speaker, and so is attached to both. A labyrinth, though, is different from a maze in that the path of a labyrinth never leads to a dead end. The path of a labyrinth always leads to the center and then to the exit as long as the pilgrim keeps walking. So although the poem ends with the word “dead,” some hope remains, at least implicitly.

Although short, Inheritance is not slight. The poems are thoughtfully composed, and they will stay with you.

Carrie Shipers. Cause for Concern. Able Muse Press, 2015. 84 pgs. $18.95

Carrie Shipers. Family Resemblances. University of New Mexico Press, 2016. 70 pgs. $17.95

Reviewed by Lynn Domina

Carrie Shipers’ second and third collections of poetry appeared within a few months of each other, and I read them within a few days of each other. Stylistically, the poems in the two collections are similar—most careful readers would with reasonable confidence identify them as composed by the same author—but they differ in theme and tone. The first, Cause for Concern, explores Shipers’ experience as primary caregiver for her husband as he recovered from kidney surgery, while Family Resemblances includes a broader range of material, though many of the poems examine the speaker’s position within her family of origin. In both collections, the poems rely on implicit or explicit narrative, comparatively even line lengths—though the lines nevertheless contribute substantially to the rhythmic interest—and language that is interesting yet direct. Both collections include a series of poems scattered throughout—in Cause for Concern it’s a sequence of haunting dog poems, and in Family Resemblances it’s a sequence of poems narrated by “The Woman Who Can’t Forget” (one of which was recently featured on Verse Daily)—that function as commentary on the poems that surround them. Throughout the collections, the speaker’s reliability is provocatively questionable, but her character is also reassuringly familiar. Like it or not, we’ve all been this speaker.

Despite the often somber content, the poems do contain some humor. “Field Guide,” for example, from Family Resemblances, reveals how the certainties of a relationship can become both less certain and more interesting: “She married him for what he knew— / names of trees, animals, how to hot wire / his Mercury…” She is gullible, however, or naïve, or both: “They had three kids before / she caught on.” Shipers delays the reader’s gratification for a few lines—“caught on” to what? Revealing the answer to that question, Shipers shifts from the names of birds to other names: “Did he make up socket wrench? Phillips head?” The husband has been answering all along, but his responses have included more fantasy than fact. The stanza breaks here, at approximately the 2/3 point, and the beginning of stanza two becomes more serious. The speaker also fantasizes,

…by pretending
to know what she only hoped, each time hoping
he’d catch her out so she could tell the truth:
I’m scared too.

Telling the truth often is a relief, and the truth the speaker is able to acknowledge demonstrates Shipers’ skill in exploiting an anecdote to reveal the poem’s own deeper truth. By its end, the poem circles back to its beginning, with the speaker asking about a bird and her husband stating, “Three-toed warbler.” What began years earlier as curiosity and play has grown into ritual, a practice that in its simplicity sustains the relationship. The poem circles back to its beginning, but that beginning has acquired more significance. Looping back this way, tying the poem’s final image to its first, is a common strategy that, in successful poems, redefines the opening. Through these twenty-three lines, readers understand how the speaker has grown through decades.

The primary factor in the success of “Field Guide” is its structure. But Shipers is also skilled in other areas of poetic craft—choices made at the level of word and line to enhance rhythm and image. Although the poems are most often free verse, the lines are informed by English poetry’s iambic history; they are not shackled by a compulsive adherence to regular meter, but the echo of meter is suggestively pleasant. Here is the last couplet of “Appetite,” a disturbing response to the tale of Hansel and Gretel: “And while I talk I’ll dish up supper—black pudding, / potatoes, a roast as sweet as suckling pig.” The first of the lines begins with three iambic feet which are interrupted with syllables “up supper” that include an internal rhyme, with the “p” repeated two syllables later and then repeated again at the beginning of the second line. Following “potatoes,” the final line returns to an iambic meter, emphasized again with alliteration and assonance. Other lines adopt similar strategies, and they are able to do so because of Shipers’ reliance on concrete, often monosyllabic vocabulary. The creepiness of this poem’s content is ironically contradicted by its pleasing music.

The poems in Cause for Concern are also memorable for their concrete imagery—one would hope, of course, that poems describing sick and wounded bodies would be concrete. The opening poem, “Wound Assessment,” alternates between references to Doubting Thomas, as he’s often called, reaching into Christ’s wounded side, and descriptions of the speaker changing the dressing on her husband’s surgical wound. The speaker here isn’t an idealized nurse but an afraid and resentful young wife. Everything begins to signify her husband’s illness, from scissors to her dining room table. Her husband’s wound is as obvious as Christ’s, but the speaker’s wound is as invisible as either doubt or belief. The poem succeeds, like “Field Guide” which I discussed above, in part because of its structure, the references to Thomas woven throughout, and also because of the language itself, particularly the verbs.

Both of these books are provocative. In Cause for Concern, the speaker acknowledges unattractive, if understandable, traits. Some readers will empathize with her response; others will not. As in fiction, it’s much more difficult to write well of an unsympathetic speaker than of an attractive one. These poems raise ethical questions, not only about marriage and the care we owe each other, but also about the responsibility of the writer, which must include a commitment to truth, especially when it’s a truth, like resentment of a spouse’s suffering, we would rather not acknowledge. The speaker in Family Resemblances is generally more sympathetic, but the family dynamics explored are nevertheless also often troubling. We could say the same about many poems, of course, including many badly written ones. The content of Shipers’ poems is interesting, but it’s her craft that’s most admirable.