Already familiar with Rebecca McClanahan’s essays about her family from her book Riddle Song (as well as her other Writing It Real articles), I was delighted when I found that a new and selected volume of her poems was coming this year. I feel moved every time I read one of the volume’s 91 poems, selected from her five previous books of poetry and from new poems.

In Deep Light, we meet Rebecca McClanahan’s family and friends, both living and dead. We meet lovers and sometimes personas she creates. Every poem in the collection is informed by crisp observation and a willingness to let the small details in a room evoke the larger emotional story. Reading McClanahan’s poems, I remember that the best art compels us to enter it as if it is our own life. It then helps us magnify the moments we experienced before we engaged with the particular piece of art. In this way, the poems awaken memories of my own family and friends and my thoughts on relationships. The poems help me enlarge moments from my past and see more in them they I could when I lived them the first time. I savor McClanahan’s poems, and at the same time, want to write about people I’ve known and know, to mark their importance to me and to commemorate the ways our lives have touched. It isn’t long before I am studying particular poems in Deep Light for avenues to investigate my own subjects.

In “Watching My Parents Sleeping Beside an Open Window Near the Sea,” the poem that opens the collection, the poet has come to visit with her parents. They are all staying in one room of a beachfront hotel, parents in a double bed and the poet in a single bed. The elderly parents’ frailty, the poet’s deep affection for them and her desire for more time with them come through in every line. Among my favorites are those with metaphor: my father’s feet white sails unfurled / at the edge of blue pajamas” and “their breaths, the tidal / rise and fall I now put my ear to.”

And I admire all the description included that is imbued with emotional subtext:

                        His shaving brush
and pink heart pills, her gardenia
sachet. The tiny spindle that pricks
the daily bubble of blood, her sweet
chemistry. Above our heads
a smoke alarm pulses, its red eye beating.
One more year, I ask the silence.

The poet is both weaving and revealing the spell she is under in that hotel room, at that time, with her parents as they are then. The images she sees and includes in her poem do the work, “furled sails,” “heart pills,” “daily bubble of blood,” “alarm pulses,” and “tidal rise and fall.”  I think of my own parents, how in adulthood after time away, I came to find them so sweet, so themselves, so necessary in my ongoing emotional life.

 Writing from an occasion–the mother, father and daughter in a motel room on what might be one of the daughter’s last opportunities to visit with her parents–provides a way for the emotions to seek out objects and register the way they touch the speaker–the father’s feet, the items on the dresser, the smoke alarm. As the poet takes in the room, she deepens her awareness of and willingness to articulate how precious her parents are to her, how unwilling she is to let them go.

“Ghost, Kiss,” Part II of the volume, begins with the poem “Salvage,” which describes the poet’s awareness of how being conceived soon after the death of her parents’ third child affected her. “I wore the bonnet knitted for you / the hooded gown, your diapers/still folded on the dresser,” the poem begins. “The world you left, I used sparingly,” the poet continues, as if explaining how being frugal and frequenting second hand stores her whole life was a way of continuing the circumstances of being in someone else’s place. The poem ends with the image of spreading a salvaged quilt over her own table, where husband and step-son will come to dinner, and thinking “where someone’s feet / once rested, there is this plate.” An offering being made always to the dead sister, the one whose death gave the poet her life.

Images of frugality–crumbled soap slivers, digging with a toothpick for the last smear of lipstick, not replacing worn heels–create this spell, the winding back through time and a way of being that carries on as we see when the poet reveals she walks in her run down heels to her own home now, where her husband’s face softens “like a leather glove worn just long enough.” She is at home in her life and an observer of the place she seems to have occupied. The infant sister’s heart was the problem the poet says, “undid you.”

The poet uses the world her sister left sparingly, as if that life long habit was for remembering that her sister came first but got to use nothing of the world we inhabit.

The poem inspires me to investigate the impact of my own birth circumstances. My father and mother were only twenty and my father was going to college on the GI Bill. They had eloped two years previously because my grandparents didn’t want to see them marry. They conceived me out of love, they always said, but they also must have known that once a child was present, their parents would stop hoping for the marriage to end and start to care that it grow strong. Thinking this way, I begin to conjure images of my childhood, the way my parents sent me forth proudly, a messenger charged with the message, “We are doing well; our daughter can you show you that.”

What images would serve me in telling this story, weaving this spell, finding insight from the cloth I make? Anything related with “messenger” and how I carried the messages, I think. And then I immediately feel again the discrepancy between the message I carried and the tension at home, caused by my parents wanting to show their parents they would succeed despite their parents’ early warnings and disagreeable reaction to the marriage. Was I a clearly written message in a ragged envelope? I search for other images of contradictions and dissonance and remember the scratchy couch we had in our living room, how I sat on it to watch television, to eat the TV dinners my mother left for my sister and me when my parents were going out. Was I like that, a girl trying to enjoy herself from an uncomfortable place? Reading “Salvage” has me looking into the impact of the circumstances of my birth, finding metaphors and details that will help relive and re-see shaping influences. I am grateful for the poem “Salvage” and the opportunity it offers me to reflect on its author’s life and then on my own, at the same time, offering strategies for conducting this reflection.

“Ex-Brother-in-law,” also in Part II, demonstrates McClanahan’s focus on the interweaving of individuals in a family and what it means to lose a member who was woven in. “Without the law, there is not brother,” opens the poem. “…we uncover the stocking stitched with your name, / not knowing what to do with it.” Acknowledging that the family says, “if only you would disappear, / my sister’s life could begin again,” the poet inquires, “But what of our lives,” “all those the unregistered / couplings of the hearts.” Ultimately, the image of a cabinet the brother-in-law built to store mementos serves to help her answer the question. He said while he worked, “It’s the small things that make a job,” “…it’s the finishing that matters.” At poem’s end, the poet notes the way the cabinet works, “a hand sanded notch and this perfectly engineered / sliding latch with its effortless closing and opening.” This might be the small thing that makes the job of accepting the ex-brother-in-law’s connection and his disconnection from the family.

I admire McClanahan’s documenting feelings about a “severed” family relationship. I admire the image she finds to express some resolution and the way remembered words from the ex-brother-in-law bring her to the knowledge she needs. So many times when we write poetry, the words we remember from other’s mouths are exactly the right ones for us to use to move deeply into our material and find the answer to the inquiry our poem makes.

I immediately think about those people no longer in my life because of my divorce 26 years ago. How do I experience the severing? What does it mean to me to have ex-sisters-in-law, ex-brothers-in-law, ex-nieces, ex-nephews and to not even know my ex-in-laws’ grandnephews and nieces?

I wonder what kind of poem or poems I might write about the losses that I have yet to consider, the unraveled fabric of a life I meant to live. What metaphor, what remembered speech might I find to help me explore this terrain? Metal tent stakes I borrowed from my ex-husband’s brother and forgot to return come to mind. I can’t remember what became of them, if I finally gave them away, after moving them from one house to another and another, unable to return them so long overdue. After reading McClanahan’s use of the cabinet and its latch to articulate her feeling about the place of her memories of her ex-brother-in-law, I am eager to sit down to write my way into an unexplored area of my life.

In “Sun, Moon, Star, Pearl,” Part III of this collection, McClanahan’s poems show her skill at writing in persona, whether that be the produce at a supermarket, a southern woman who is a clay eater, or a male cab driver in Phoenix. In a seemingly light-hearted poem, McClanahan’s imagination allows produce to illustrate the nature of women and their lives–artichokes have armor that “hide secret hearts,” onions can be “counted on,” green peppers “take their muscles seriously” like modern women, carrots are the “last to lose their figures,” apples are “aging showgirls who don’t want to quit,” banana bunches are like “firm young girls in sleep” who’ll soon “learn the bruise.” And there are more, the avocado who ages well, growing sweeter as she grows softer, potatoes who “come into their own slowly,” the eggplant mother who offers wholeness, and oranges who “are what they seem” and “speak our own name.”

Experiencing McClanahan’s resonant writing about family and her delightful examination of female identity through vegetables, I begin thinking about combining these two focuses. What would happen if I decided to write about my mother, father, husband, ex-husband, in-laws, children, or grandchildren from the aisles of the supermarket? Could I explore my grandson’s nature by talking about cereals? For instance, if I titled a poem, “What Cereal is Toby Turning Five,” I could write about various kinds of cereal, hot and cold sweetened and unsweetened, flakes and puffs, with fruit and without. I am feeling like I could draw a wonderful portrait of this child.

I continue reading through the next two sections of McClanahan’s absorbing collection, savoring the generous serving of poems. I am more informed by the honest, compelling work each time I read it, and at the same time, I am continually inspired to dive into my own work, nurtured by McClanahan’s many strategies. Each time I put the finished book down, it is with the knowledge that I’ll be picking it up again soon, ready to have it help me take my part again in the conversation we poets keep alive and growing.