Book Review: To Some Women I Have Known
To Some Women I Have Known. Re'Lynn Hansen. White Pine Press, The Marie Alexander Poetry Series, March 24, 2015, Trade Paperback, 120 pages.
Reviewed by Sue Roupp.
This is an interesting book composed of prose poems interspersed with narrative text. It is a memoir describing women the author has known and that addresses universal themes: death, leaving those you love, the author’s relationship with her grandmother, and descriptions of other ordinary details of everyday life. The author uses ornithology as a metaphor for change.
In “Woman in a Coma Had Taken Drug” the author says, “I thought of myself as a town and country sort of gal on the lam.” She takes us on her life journey, going off with her friend June to Guatemala, rather than attending college where she imagined she would discuss “Keats and poetic symmetry.” This is the author’s life journey, and she takes the reader along with her in this book.
The author reflects on the tragedy of Karen Ann Quinlan, who, at 19, was kept alive on a respirator and not allowed to die a natural death. She describes the waves crashing into the hotel room she shares with her friend June, utilizing the sand as a metaphor to represent death. It is as if nature has struck their Guatemalan hotel, leaving evidence of its grainy self behind.
In “She Has Given Me a Spectacle and I Have Given Her a Pear” the author discusses her mother in delightful, insightful language, sketching her mother’s growing infirmity with age: “Watching my mother’s hands is like watching the fins of manta rays skimming the ocean floor.” Her mother asks about the evening pear her daughter serves her, saying “You’ll have to tell me the special secret of the pear,” and Re’Lynn replies, “Mother, I don’t think there is a secret to the pear. It’s a pear.” Her mother protests, “But you serve it cold and not cut thinly . . . it’s the way you cut the pear, and often, with others, they’re too soft.”
Re’Lynn’s mother emphasizes how her daughter lives life differently than she has lived her life. Re’Lynn is decisive, not soft. “This is her belief: there will always be someone on the shore, waiting, with an anchor,” just as Re’Lynn as become her mother’s anchor.
Re’Lynn has invited us to read about her life in a poetic and lyrical way interspersed with dialogue, scenes, people, and a sense of our narrator’s exploration into a potent universal question: Who am I? It is a book to be enjoyed and savored by everyone.