With a quirky poignance, Dannye Romine Powell’s third collection probes the nature of loss—loss that’s actual and loss that’s feared. In these poems, loss takes many guises. With its ferny breath, loss is sometimes the lover who waits in secret on the porch. Sometimes even loss recognizes the feeling of loss and “calls the cops / to say his best friend / went fishing and won’t answer his phone.” Often, the poet mourns a loss of innocence, as when she learns, after attending the funeral of a friend, that the dead woman’s husband has a history of infidelity. There’s also the loss of romantic love, as when the woman “pulls / toward shore, a shore she calls by a name / she swore she’d never breathe again.”
At the heart of this collection, however, is the poet’s dread of losing an alcoholic son, a son whose anticipated death provokes the poet into a dialogue with “Mrs. Caldwell,” the fictional hero of Camilo Jose Cela’s novel, Mrs. Caldwell Speaks to Her Son. The poet chides Mrs. Caldwell, who mourns her son Eliacim’s death at sea, while at the same time, she aligns herself with her: “Certain words, Mrs. C., we mothers must not utter / to our sons. I keep a list. Slippers is one. Lilac another. Wreath. Tremble, Perfumed. Silk. Flutter. And, barefoot, of course.”
This fear of loss prompts the poet to consider how she might tell her alcoholic son’s young daughter of his death, should it happen. “Perhaps I should begin today,” she muses, “stringing / her a necklace of bees. When they bite / and welts quilt her face, when her lips / whiten and swell, I’ll take her by the shoulders. ‘Child, listen to me. / One day, you’ll see. These stings / are nothing. Nothing at all.’”