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CIRQUE
John Morgan
Every Atom, by Erin Coughlin Hollowell
Boreal Books, Pasadena, CA, 2018
Back when I was in college, my “new critic” teachers insisted that the I in poetry should never be confused with the poet. The I was always referred to as “the speaker” and was assumed to be, at least in part, an ironic literary construction. Around the same time, however, the confessional poets, among them Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Ann Sexton, rebelled against this doctrine, writing openly about themselves, flaunting their individual experiences (even if they made some of it up for dramatic effect). As a result, the distance between the speaker and the I of the poem narrowed. And these days, except in the case of obvious persona poems, we’ve gotten used to identifying the first person speaker with the poet. Every Atom, Erin Coughlin Hollowell’s somber new book about her mother’s decline into senility and the effect it had on her, is packed with this kind of powerful personal poetry. As the book opens she talks to her mother on the phone and her mother asks her to call her father, even though he’s sitting right there next to her and “He’s the one who handed her the phone.” The mother is losing her identity, and this loss is echoed in the snowy winter landscape outside the poet’s window: “First/the mountains disappear, then the water,/the trees…now all is white.” Most of the poems in the book are in regular stanzas, imposing a sense of order on the wrenching emotional states Hollowell captures as her mother declines. We feel the inner conflict and the writer’s strain in trying to maintain control but we also sense that these events follow a methodical, if heartbreaking, progression of their own. Again and again the natural world is invoked and we watch the seasons advance, sometimes as consolation but more often as an echo of the poet’s anxious inner state. And throughout the book we follow as the poet reassesses her relationship with her mother. In an
early poem, she confesses, “I was an accident,” and the reader wonders at what age and under what circumstance this revelation came to her. Hollowell goes on:
How easy it is
now to enumerate the many small disappointments
that have worn my clothing.
It takes a brave poet to offer up such a story, but the well-crafted honesty of the writing holds us and compensates for the book’s bleak narrative. We are all aging, all losing pieces of our early glory, and we need, at least once in a while, to face up to it. But the world retains its beauties, and Hollowell’s writing is alive to these as well:
How the light sluices across leaves so new they purl and shine. How two swallows flaunt above Me carving wedges of blue…
An unexpected presence in this book, serving almost as a guardian angel, is the poet Walt Whitman. Every Atom as a whole and each poem in it take their titles from Whitman’s Song of Myself. “For every atom belonging to me,” Whitman wrote, “as good belongs to you.” But his long poem is mainly a celebration of the self, while Hollowell’s book deals with the difficult ending of her mother’s life. The connection between the poets is not always easy to see. The prose poem “Hankering, gross, mystical, nude,” however, takes the form of a letter to Whitman. It begins: “Dear Walt, I see you around town, your scraggly white beard and ragged jacket.” The speaker (whoops, there I go) seeks comfort from this master, and he seems willing to offer it, but even here doubt and confusion intrude. The poem’s ending offers a temporary if sardonic consolation, advising us to “hold our lovers close while we can still remember their names.”
Erin Coughlin Hollowell