Spanning decades and distance, generations of women move through each other’s lives in Rebecca Hart Olander’s second full-length poetry collection, Singing from the Deep End.
Opening with “Cape Ann,” “a cape named for a mother, / and a queen,” the speaker in this poem offers us a view of her mother as a free-spirited young woman in the early stages of pregnancy. Situating readers on the New England coast, whose moody ambiance is a key driver of this and other poems, we see the shore, ocean, and “granite quarries cold and deep.” Not an easy place to love, it seems, a trait it shares with many of its inhabitants, yet its difficult beauty calls the speaker back: “Tidal, time and again I return.”
“Gloucester Music” also evokes the north Atlantic coast, a landscape distilled to its “briny and barnacled” self, where “duplicity is part of its charm.” The legacy of this rough place stays with the speaker, molding her into the person she eventually becomes. She observes, “my hometown, / how it splinters inside,” these broken and radiant fragments later coalescing into the building blocks of her life.
Olander’s ambivalent memories of her childhood, complicated by a lack of resources and the strain on her mother of maintaining a household as a single parent, also ripple through this collection.
In “Book of Changes,” we learn of a mother whose carefree spirit clashed with her responsibilities to her children, causing her daughter unexpected hardship, and later, in “Attachment,” Olander recalls the prized possessions of her girlhood – comic books, a bicycle sporting a “padded pink banana seat with sparkle sheen,” “my Barbie apparel case,” – all lost or stolen out from under her mother’s eye.
“Nothing was ever secured,” she writes. “Did that teach me / to be an optimist? A liar? A poet?”
In “This Bird Has Flown,” the speaker reminds us of those moments of mortification endemic to early adolescence. As her mother enjoys a visit with friends, the ten-year-old speaker cringes at the sight of her own “pee-soaked mattress / drying in the sun.” Embarrassment, acute as it can only be when you’re ten, also includes seeing “my mother / in her floral halter top, singing, stoned…”
She ends the poem with a revelation many of us have had about our own parents: that perhaps it would’ve been better “to have been her friend” than her child.
The heart of the book, “The Jerica Poems,” confronts the death from cancer of Olander’s close friend, mother to a small son.
In “Swim Lessons” she links the experience of a young girl enduring the casual cruelty of the public pool to the news, years later, about her friend’s diagnosis. The speaker flashes back to the sensation of “the instructor’s palm pressing / on my crown,” connecting this memory to the drowning sensation she experiences when “a friend calls to say / she has breast cancer.”
After her friend’s death, the speaker continues to contend with waves of complex emotions. “As Bees” confirms this for us: “It surprises, every time, the will. How it thrives, / then gives over to a readiness to die.”
Still – and beautifully – after Jerica’s death, their connection endures:
Talking to you now is like the language of bees:
A humming I do. The humming back you do.
In the book’s final section, Olander continues to explore the brutal beauty of motherhood.
In “Carrying Lessons,” a mother orca displays the most poignant form of parental grief:
Tahlequah carries her dead for seventeen
days over one thousand miles balanced
on her own head while the calf
deteriorates in the sun.
These lines demonstrate the unbreakable bond between a mother and her children as they dwell within each other, flesh of each other’s flesh. The metaphor of swimming returns, too, as the speaker prepares to part from her own child —“I’m swimming through / these days the best I can.”
In “The Conception of Immaculate,” the speaker reflects on the lessons she wishes she’d taught her daughter,
I praised her goodness, but I should have
urged her to be wicked, told her how
gorgeous and glowing it is to be human.
while “Malum” begins, “This morning, my son taught me the Latin word for evil.”
The silences between the speaker and her teenaged son in this poem stretch uncomfortably, even as she tries to break them: “I never / know what to do during those silent car rides home, words stuck / in my mouth.”
The poem conjures the sense of detachment that so often results from trying to communicate with a child on the cusp of adulthood, a son still familiar but clearly moving away from his mother even as she grasps for him: “these conversations between the computer, school / and sleep… / I wish there were more.”
“I’m no longer / hiding chocolate eggs among tree roots,” Olander writes in “On Mothering, Mortality, and the Wankel T. rex,” the speaker here mourning the loss of her children’s earlier holiday traditions. The speaker returns to bed with a cup of coffee, where she turns on the radio and hears the story of Kathy Wankel, who found a 66-million-year-old T. rex fossil while on a camping trip. She calls the fossil her “big, ugly baby” but also “beautiful.”
“As mothers must,” Olander writes, “Kathy let go of what was never hers.”
Filled with deeply affecting poems about love and loss, growth and grief, Singing from the Deep End tells the truth about mother-love in its many forms. These are poems that take a life’s smallest moments and use them to enlarge the world.