by Jessica Gigot

Poetry focused on the experience of motherhood, or that has the perspective of a mother figure, is sometimes seen as overly domestic. However, the many dimensions of mothering can inform other aspects of human experience. Two recent collections, Meltwater by Claire Wahmanholm and Curve by Kate Reavey, illuminate what we all gain when we examine the intricacies of life with a maternal lens.

Wahmanholm’s Meltwater is a somber feast of sounds and images, part remembrance and part gut-wrenching prediction; in poems both playful and bleak, the author employs lyrical repetition and fierce honesty to explore topics ranging from ecological change to personal grief. A series of poems titled after letters of the alphabet offer a particularly rich slurry of language, alliteration, and imagery: In “M” Wahmanholm writes, “I am a mare rolling in a midnight / meadow, all musk and muzzle,” while in “P” she speaks of her daughter directly: “I place her outside my arm’s parenthesis so she can’t feel my pulse/ pounding.”

Several poems in this book share the same title, such as “Meltwater” and “Glacier”; these poems are in conversation with each other and also serve as a touchstone for the rest of the collection. The “Meltwater” entries are erasure poems taken from an essay by Lacy M. Johnson called “How to Mourn a Glacier,” and the “Glacier” series examines glaciers as both abstract concepts and fleeting creatures. Wahmanholm’s treatment of water imagery can get confusing as she considers its various transformations, however, in the final “Glacier” poem of the collection she brings it all under one rubric when she writes, “It is the water I am trying to teach my daughters to float in.” There is deep reverence for the changing state of glaciers as well as immense guilt for what they will represent to future generations.

In the book’s penultimate poem, “The Empty Universe,” Wahmanholm writes:

I cannot, this night, stop myself
from listening to my daughter wail
and wishing she were less like herself
therefore less like me

Meltwater is the poet’s wail against the way our environment is changing. With the discerning eye and open heart of a mother, she startles the reader awake—in no small part because of her willingness to divulge her own vulnerabilities.

Reavey’s Curve navigates the full arc of a life, starting with poems focused on early motherhood, then moving through stages of parenting, marriage, and loss. Curve alludes to the shapes that contain us, the roles (like motherhood) that give us perspective on how the world works and for whom. In the poem “Curve is a word” Reavey sets the scope of her observational task: “that the curve / of the earth / is too small to see, / yet defines us // allows us to breathe.” Through the container of these observant and autobiographical poems, Reavey shares the textured experience of her own life as a woman, wife, and mother.

Reavey is focused on the body, particularly the way it transfigures through time and with age. The collection’s first poem includes a vision: “as I, in my own bed, dream of being / a mother.” Later, in “After the Hysterectomy,” the poet confesses, “Mine as verb // no longer possible.” Her physical experiences within a mother-body speak to a broader understanding of longing and the challenge of grappling with temporal changes to identity.

The poems in Curve elevate the quotidian in surprising ways; a series about grief, for example, melds the making of blackberry jam with the death of the poet’s mother. In “Grief,” she writes, “Fruit ripens, even in rain”; “Grief II” begins, “Blackberries boiling on the stovetop / are not violence. Their color changes.” In “Grief III,” Reavey concludes:

Come December I will wrap the jars, drop them in the heel
of stockings.
                                 Christmas morning, the fruit will remind me
of everything
except loss.

The metaphor is clear: Through the process of creating something, the poet becomes able to let go of the past; tending to others she is also modeling renewal.

These two collections offer distinct visions, to be sure—the fractured nature of Wahmanholm’s work is perhaps a generational artifact, rooted in skepticism, defiance, and frustration, while Reavey’s poems focus on complexities within relationships and between self and place rather than global urgencies—yet they both traverse wide swaths of emotion while anchoring their poems in the grit of life. As we continue to face ecological catastrophe, political collapse, and a thousand paper cuts of isolation from human contact, the tender and receptive voice of the mother may be what is needed most.