What renders these poems compelling resides in their focus on human nature and its profound dependence on memory. Any reader who has cared for beloved elders will slip into these poems at once, recalling moments of pain and the black humor, anger, helplessness, and guilt they often arouse. They also provide insights into the nature of memory itself: how flexible — or is that fickle? — it can be, how merciful its loss sometimes becomes, and how cruelly that loss erases much of what makes us who we are. The consoling and enriching value of these poems is the way they encourage us to imagine, understand, rehearse, and prepare to forgive the changes that time may bring about in anyone. Poems as nakedly genuine as these constitute a series of voyages not possible by other means: into the minds of others; into futures not yet revealed to us; and into our own deepest, most enduring selves to find what we may need there.
––Rhina P. Espaillat, bilingual poet, short story writer, essayist, translator, and teacher; author of, most recently, And After All and The Field
Lost memory, lost sanity, lost words, lost dignity. And yet this collection offers so much. What opens as a lamentation for a mother’s fading memory soon blooms into an exploration into the meaning and role of memory itself — not just for the speaker, but, indeed, for the entire human race. Here, memory isn’t just a facet of human experience, but a stay against oblivion. And yet, forgetting has its uses, too. From a profoundly personal poem about playing cards with a grandniece to an imagined journey to the dark side of the moon in search of lost memory, the collection is as intimate as it is epic. Mary K. O’Melveny has created another work of import and catharsis that counters the slow accretion of loss we all face.
––Charlotte Pence, author of Code and Many Small Fires
Mary K O’Melveny’s new poetry volume gives a reader so many pleasures of mind and spirit — so much to contemplate. Her expansive intellectual range and curiosity lead her to create evocative, resonant, and specific visions that yoke metaphoric conceits from art to science to her exploration of the process of memory and forgetting. She creates original and complex poetic visions, embodying forms of witnessing, mourning and grief — personal, familial, societal, and historical. Following Carolyn Forche’s injunction “against forgetting,” these poems move fluidly from meditations on natural phenomena and the results of climate change (the loss of bird species, for example), to such personal subject matter as her parents’ relationship, her best friend’s dementia, her mother’s diminishing memory, her Irish heritage to sites of societal and global injustice and trauma to larger cosmic realities such as black holes as symbolic of the obliteration of memory. She compares loss of vision with our denial of injustice and with vivid detail urges us to embrace a “slight refraction of light / [which reveals] blood and bones / to fill up our tidy yard.” Her poetry conveys the deeper realities beneath the surface of our “tidy yard[s]” in striking moments of illumination.
––Jan Zlotnik Schmidt, author of Foraging for Light and She Had This Memory
