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 Emotion is strongly depicted. When you read “Fear”, it gets you inside, and for a moment, you sit with the poet sharing her experience. Same goes for “How the Fish Feels”. I like strong poetry where the poet has invested themselves in their poetry and sharing it with the reader.
Reviewed by Sheri Harper
Mom’s Canoe
by Rebecca Foust
Texas Review Press
ISBN: 13:978-1-933896-27-4, February 28, 2009, Paperback: 40 pages
Mom’s Canoe reads like a busy person talking to you about reality while they put away the groceries, sweep, never resting much, no nonsense. This is the voice of Rebecca Foust, who is clear and straight forward and detailed as she writes the poems of her home growing up in the Alleghenies of Pennsylvania and of her parents. The details are grittily real. You never doubt where you are, you can see the mountains, the lakes, feel the dirt.
My favorite poem though is “Crickets at Lakemont Park” where young lovers spread their blankets and click painted tin clickers that would arc and release, ending with the lovely sensuality of “Your hands, your tongue, the cricket-sung, grass-sweet dark.” Very nice, like a place you’d take your husband.
The most plain spoken of the bunch is a poem written to an abused woman (her mother?) and expresses what many of us feel when we hear about the subject, disbelief and horror coming through clearly in “Backwoods”:
You’d go back to him, then,
your swaggering full-bird
second husband, fragged in Korea,
and now hunkered down
here in this backwater?
How could you,
after he blackened your eye …
Emotion is strongly depicted. When you read “Fear”, it gets you inside, and for a moment, you sit with the poet sharing her experience. Same goes for “How the Fish Feels”. I like strong poetry where the poet has invested themselves in their poetry and sharing it with the reader.
Two poems seem to be elegies to her parents, “The Dream” tells of her father’s dream of taking a cruise and “Perennial” perhaps to her mother, the lines “When you’re gone it won’t matter to the musk rose/ twining the old trellis over the eaves. Willow/ will continue to pour its yellow-green waterfall ….” Sadness is embedded in the tone and the details seem about another’s hobby, looked at with new eyes. Another poem captures the surprise of reacquainting with a sister who visited in “I saw your taper-finger / knot-vein, walnut-knuckle/ just like Mom’s/ and mine, somehow/ knitting together….”
Perhaps, though, what makes this chapbook a winner of the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize for 2008 is the clarity of place that comes through in many of the poems.
"The Mountains Come Close When it Rains” isn’t easily pulled apart, the details tie a tone together, almost of impatience, about people who don’t understand about life lived on the land. Examples “how butchering a deer can be an elegy for life as it used to be … when a man’s family was hungry, he got them some meat” and “she wasn’t splitting the furnace wood; she didn’t have to clean out the well the summer it went foul.” It’s a tone shared in the poem “Things Burn Down”, almost as if they were written at about the same time. “Papap hauled ash / or laid brick; he was skilled with a trowel / but ther was no work, understand?” It’s a tone that says, try to relate to where someone else comes from, to feel what they feel, to share the tasks and places they took on.
This is a strong collection of poems that share the experience from a time and place where life wasn’t always soft and easy but it was real. Very well written and easy to read, the poems in Mom's Canoe have an honesty all their own.
About the reviewer: Sheri Fresonke Harper is a poet and writer. She's been published in many small journals and is working on her second science fiction novel. See www.sfharper.com
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