by Laura Sims
Fence Books 2009
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

Outlines

There is an abundance of white space in Laura Sims’s Stranger, white space that connotes absence. The title itself implies unknowing, missing information, and speakers in the poems are hesitant, unsure of their relationship with anything that surrounds them – yet they are aware of  a change, of crossing an invisible boundary. Stranger speaks to loss, specifically the loss of a mother. More so, the poems explore the composition of absence, and attempt to outline the components that evaporate at death and those that remain whole and viable in memory.

Reflecting the sense of incompletion that comes after a loss, these poems are deeply fragmented, and are spoken through multiple voices. The book is arranged into five chronological sections representing a mother’s life before the birth of her daughter, this mother’s sickness and death, and life as it exists for her surviving daughter. At times it is difficult – particularly in the case of a page break – to tell whether one fragment is part of a previous poem, or if something new has begun.

It seems that loss can only be told in sketches, loss the obscurely diagrammed space between relationship and the absence of relationship. One is reminded in Stranger that any relationship is in some sense defined by the fact that it will end. This fact adds almost ungovernable weight and value to the real, physical, mental experience of the relationship as it passes through time. In what I take to be the second half of the opening poem, titled “Seemed to have crossed a dark lake,” the speaker begins her exploration of memory and establishes the relationship between mother and daughter. The poem concludes,

She smiles and gestures, nodding her head, beckoning as she backs up,

backs into her mother, and curls away from us, smiling into her mother’s

skirt, moving her lips against the soft, scratchy fabric.

For many daughters, mother is protector, one who provides the initial connection between child and world. So what happens to that connection when the wire’s casing dissolves? A daughter facing her environment for the first time without her mother must learn to negotiate in new ways. Suddenly, she finds herself on the front lines.

Of course, that’s not to say that a daughter doesn’t or can’t have a relationship with the world that is wholly her own; eventually she must – but very often her mother provides a first lens through which to view the outside, and to work towards understanding it. When a daughter finds herself without that barrier for the first time, she might feel lost, confused or broken, might feel that a part of her own identity has died. In “My hand, too small for gathering,” a poem from the final section, we see Sims’s speaker feeling fragile:

A dried leaf –

 

I was afraid.

 

The valley was deaf

And cluttered with occupants

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The world was old with spoiled arts.

The dry dust billowed in the marketplace.

The daughter was there for her mother’s long illness, which adds layers to the experience. A fragment in the section “Letters from Elsewhere Part 2 (1993)” provides the speaker’s painful realization that she is watching her mother vanish:

You sleeping too much

What it means is
Crossing the bridge into fog

In the many attempts to reconnect with her environment after the loss of her mother, the daughter in Stranger finds herself wondering if it is still possible relate to a mother who is no longer physical.

In “The way she loves her,” Sims repeats the word “underground.” As a culture that often buries our dead, it can be difficult to overcome the fact that the body we once experienced regularly still has form, but is part of the body of the earth. It will never be touched by human hands again, will never be seen. We look elsewhere for signs that the body is unimportant, that essence remains of something that no longer exists:

“All this,” she says, spreading here arms to the ocean.

“All this,” her friend echoes, leaning over the rail.

The sharp wind reddens their faces, tangles their hair. They laugh

open-mouthed. She can’t say where she comes from now–Ocean?
             Sky?

The ethereal ever-presence of the dead, real or imagined, is repeatedly expressed throughout the collection. It is evident in a later poem’s title, “She is water poured out.” Death can be seen as a release: in death, one achieves simultaneity with other unliving things that carry dramatic force, such as sky or water. The speaker recognizes hope that her relationship with her mother need not die or end with her mother’s death; death is simply a borderland or blending, even if only imagined as such. 

Stranger’s closing poem, “ ‘Bound together, we matter’,” is hopeful and combats loss with the notion that family ties provide undying bonds; they enable the deceased to live on and continue to be loved. The final lines of the poem are as follows: “Dissent cannot undo / An end or // An origin.” The finality of a death implies the absolute certainty, or completion, of an existence. Sims’s speaker grows stronger in recognition of this. Though the poems in Stranger are often elusive, they never fail to leave the reader with a clear, emotional meaning. We feel a certain way, though we don’t know exactly how we arrived at the feeling. It’s the same with grieving, sadness or regret – we cannot retrace our steps, but we can filter hints, whispers. 

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