by Kathryn Stripling Byer
Louisiana State University Press 2006
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

Pumpkins for Absence

Kathryn Stripling Byer’s poems in Coming to Rest are often indulgently sweet.  The plush language and potentially captivating narrative are dulled by excessive sentimentality. The title poem of the book comes early on in Part 1 and immediately reveals Byer’s inability to let a stanza or a poem come to its natural ending point.  The first section of this poem is engaging; the speaker tells the story of a mother whose child has died and obsessively she asks her remaining children to name their first daughter after their dead sibling.  This compulsion seems to be what initially drives the poem into the second section, but Byer doesn’t allow it to do its work.  Rather, she continues:

Another name for letting go.
Or holding on.
Another name for home.

These lines are redundant, over-explanatory, and worse, they are distracting from the provocative nature of the previous lines.

Byer continues the poem in this fashion, with overwritten lines like, “I’m trapped in a coma / of middle-aged dullness” that evoke frustration rather than sympathy.  She does manage to end the fourth section nicely, though the fifth section seems extraneous.  The speaker has been visited by the dead child from the beginning of the poem whom we find out would have been her aunt.  The speaker is glad for the meeting and refers to the aunt as “this dust I’ve stirred from/ sleep.  This shell of light.”

Still, Byer is able to draw us in here and there in the first few sections. Coming to Rest is dedicated to her daughter, a fitting and obvious choice after the fourth consecutive poem that has to do with missing her.  This midsection of the book is overbearing and difficult to avoid skimming, but by the fourth “daughter” poem something unexpected happens, a sort of renewal.  Just when we’re sick of hearing about it Byer manages to draw us in one final time.  She describes her flight to Chicago to see her daughter and rather than focusing on the emotional reunion she observes the stratosphere from her window:

…lapis lazuli and white
shag carpet all the way there.
Nobody at home up here.

She momentarily gives in to her loneliness, the feeling that she has been left behind by her daughter and accepts it as not a wholly bad thing.

If there is one thing Kathryn Stripling Byer has down it’s creating a sincere sense of loneliness, not necessarily a pitiable loneliness, but often, a desirable one.  In “Stopping” the loneliness seems satisfying.  The speaker is coming back to an empty house, but somehow she is able to reconcile with the unoccupied space. “Nobody to welcome us home but the jiggety-jig / of these bugs in the glow of our headlights.”  What is slightly distracting is the use of “us” and “our” meaning that someone is in the car with her and therefore she is not alone, making it difficult to give in to the poem’s vital sense of solitude.

Byer is most successful when she is strange.  In “Halloween” the speaker has an imagined conversation with a pumpkin:

If I asked him, the pumpkin
would say he knows nothing of this. Let us pumpkins
be pumpkins, he’d say.

The talking pumpkin is the most interesting thing in this poem.  It’s funny; not particularly complex, but who cares.  The pumpkin just wants to be left the hell out of it.  Unfortunately it seems the pumpkin isn’t meant to be the center of the poem.  The focus is a young girl masquerading as a princess; she is less interesting.  It isn’t surprising to see a young girl pretending to be a princess from time to time, especially at Halloween.

On rare occasions, her sentimentality is successful.  The speaker in “Empty,” a mother, details what it is like to leave a daughter at college.  It is sad for the speaker, but it is also an opportunity.  We learn from the poem that the speaker’s own mother was overbearing and unable to let go of her children and that this is a chance for the speaker to do right where her mother might have failed.  By the end of the poem she has realized, “This is her city now,/ let her stand at the heart of it.”  She allows her daughter to own her new life, “Its welcoming emptiness.”

The final lines of the book are also some of the most gratifying.  Byer concludes by describing the souls of the world constantly leaving and returning as a “swish of an icy/ mare’s tail over the December sky.”

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