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tommyhousworth's review against another edition
5.0
The Shallows chronicles the poet's father's illness (the aftermath of a massive stroke) as well as her own (an almost impossible to diagnose debilitating disease). While the poems are deeply personal, anyone who is faced with caring for a loved one, or dealing with their own illness, grief, or even such common challenges as anxiety or depression, will find these verses to be universal in their ability to relate to these all-too-human conditions.
These are not the words of a woman who sat in a hospital waiting room and studied characters, but instead someone who herself lived deep inside the uncertainty, the frustrations, the pain, and the unanswerable questions that haunt us as those we love age and fall ill, or as we ourselves find our own bodies and minds turned upside down by something irrevocable. The terror, the reassurances, the search for something solid to set foot on are all here in breathtaking, sparse verse. The Shallows will take you under again and again, and when you come back up, you'll feel oddly comforted that someone was so capable of capturing how you've felt, that someone said what you couldn't find words for. The Shallows is a hand to hold onto when you feel no one can possibly understand what has, uninvited, enveloped you.
These are not the words of a woman who sat in a hospital waiting room and studied characters, but instead someone who herself lived deep inside the uncertainty, the frustrations, the pain, and the unanswerable questions that haunt us as those we love age and fall ill, or as we ourselves find our own bodies and minds turned upside down by something irrevocable. The terror, the reassurances, the search for something solid to set foot on are all here in breathtaking, sparse verse. The Shallows will take you under again and again, and when you come back up, you'll feel oddly comforted that someone was so capable of capturing how you've felt, that someone said what you couldn't find words for. The Shallows is a hand to hold onto when you feel no one can possibly understand what has, uninvited, enveloped you.
mepresley's review against another edition
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.75
This collection was held together by a tribute to her father's life, focusing a lot as well on grief at the way that his life ended, not quickly, but slowly and painfully, after failed rehabilitation. It is bookended with two lovely poems: "Dream in Which My Father Doesn't Wake Up," which imagines a quick death "In which we say goodbye / graveside instead of this daily/ diminishing, the slow erosion /of self swept out to sea"; and "Dream in Which Someone I Lost Returns to Me as a Horse," "unsaddled, trailing its reins in the sand loosely behind/ like second thoughts, a beast unburdened, unyoked," whom she unbridles & watches walk away. A few poems in it dealt with her own chronic illness as well.
My favorite poems were "Alternative Therapies," "My Father Finally Says Out Loud the Word I've Only Heard Him Think," "Hospital, Rehab, Nursing Home Again," "The Shallows," "Diagnosis," "Child's Play," and "What Next," the latter of which is a very dark poem about her father's failed attempted suicide.
"Alternative Therapies" is about trying a hyperbaric therapy on her father:
"pure oxygen under
pressure delivered to cells
that are dead or dormant.
Of course the dead will not rise
again, but the sleeping, the penumbra
of cells that circle the dead, stand
a chance of being awakened.
Muscle memory. Residual
effects. Cries of the body carry
with them new language to be
learned, to measure what has
happened, what was lost..."
"My Father Finally Says..."
"...when suddenly,
through the garbled spit of catfish that used to be
his language, I hear the word peal clean and sharp,
serrating the spaces between them [her father and his Kenyan caregivers], hanging
in the air like a curtain to be parted..."
"Hospital, Rehab, Nursing Home Again"
Everything about his care puzzles him,
from the oxygen tube looped
behind his ears to the bracelet
on his wrist holding hostage his name...."
"The Shallows"
"my father taught me the physics of the sea,
that waves are disturbances caused
by distant winds, how they shoal
higher and higher in the shallows
until the break, or don't, while below,
the ocean floor erodes.....
...I scissored us both through the unyielding waves, our chests heaving
ragged with the knowledge of what was to come--the fragility of the future as certain to
me as the grainy sandbar our grateful knees dragged against in the respite, the transitory
safety of right now."
"Diagnosis"
"Just like in Vegas, employees
at Mayo end every transaction with
Good luck, the wave of a hand closing
all bets, numbers clutches to chests
as we stumble chair to chair....
..."In some
eyes, kindness, compassion for the odds
the house has stacked and towering.
In others, the necessary, shrouded guard
they don like uniforms every day
for the work of making change for us dead."
"Child's Play"
"Just yesterday, ringed circles, sweaty
palms, Ashes, ashes, we all fall
down goes Uncle Dan with his smoldering
cigarette and single malt, Red Rover,
Red Rover, Claude Murphy runs over
like he did on the beach at Iwo
Jima, weapon high, Go Fish his oldest
friend from the bottom of the boat-blessed sea."
"What Next"
..."to brace it against the dead
weight of his hand, to thumb off the safety, to not reconsider, to get past the guilt,
his old god, long enough not to care, to take the weapon, his life, at last into his
hands, to close his eyes tight and inhale a deep breath, to remember his training,
the trigger exhale as he curls his forefinger in the gentlest come here..."
My favorite poems were "Alternative Therapies," "My Father Finally Says Out Loud the Word I've Only Heard Him Think," "Hospital, Rehab, Nursing Home Again," "The Shallows," "Diagnosis," "Child's Play," and "What Next," the latter of which is a very
"Alternative Therapies" is about trying a hyperbaric therapy on her father:
"pure oxygen under
pressure delivered to cells
that are dead or dormant.
Of course the dead will not rise
again, but the sleeping, the penumbra
of cells that circle the dead, stand
a chance of being awakened.
Muscle memory. Residual
effects. Cries of the body carry
with them new language to be
learned, to measure what has
happened, what was lost..."
"My Father Finally Says..."
"...when suddenly,
through the garbled spit of catfish that used to be
his language, I hear the word peal clean and sharp,
serrating the spaces between them [her father and his Kenyan caregivers], hanging
in the air like a curtain to be parted..."
"Hospital, Rehab, Nursing Home Again"
Everything about his care puzzles him,
from the oxygen tube looped
behind his ears to the bracelet
on his wrist holding hostage his name...."
"The Shallows"
"my father taught me the physics of the sea,
that waves are disturbances caused
by distant winds, how they shoal
higher and higher in the shallows
until the break, or don't, while below,
the ocean floor erodes.....
...I scissored us both through the unyielding waves, our chests heaving
ragged with the knowledge of what was to come--the fragility of the future as certain to
me as the grainy sandbar our grateful knees dragged against in the respite, the transitory
safety of right now."
"Diagnosis"
"Just like in Vegas, employees
at Mayo end every transaction with
Good luck, the wave of a hand closing
all bets, numbers clutches to chests
as we stumble chair to chair....
..."In some
eyes, kindness, compassion for the odds
the house has stacked and towering.
In others, the necessary, shrouded guard
they don like uniforms every day
for the work of making change for us dead."
"Child's Play"
"Just yesterday, ringed circles, sweaty
palms, Ashes, ashes, we all fall
down goes Uncle Dan with his smoldering
cigarette and single malt, Red Rover,
Red Rover, Claude Murphy runs over
like he did on the beach at Iwo
Jima, weapon high, Go Fish his oldest
friend from the bottom of the boat-blessed sea."
"What Next"
..."to brace it against the dead
weight of his hand, to thumb off the safety, to not reconsider, to get past the guilt,
his old god, long enough not to care, to take the weapon, his life, at last into his
hands, to close his eyes tight and inhale a deep breath, to remember his training,
the trigger exhale as he curls his forefinger in the gentlest come here..."
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