Thomasin and their difficult relationship, that would be enough. But there are these postcards. Single minded in content and addressed only to the grandfather, they are non-reflective and offer no comment on the relationship of the daughter to the mother. They stand alone, isolated among the poems like individual poppies sprung up in a well-manicured field of clover. The over whel m ing tone of Thompson’s poems expresses an attitude of longing, and the postcards capture the object of that longing. Their purpose appears to be to give voice to the relationship Thomasin had with her grandfather and to celebrate that relationship. This is made clear in the poem “Postcards.”
Thompson would find the cards to her father on the nightstand when she visited him. She tells us that they were the only way she had of knowing what her daughter was up to during the years her phone calls dwindled to almost nothing. The cards would be signed, “Thinking of you, Pop.” From these cards, the poet tells us she was under no illusion “which shelf he occupied / in the library of her affections.” “And how did that make you, her mother, feel?” a shrink would no doubt ask, and I would have to answer that it made me happy—happier, I think, than if those cards had been addressed
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