Grace Massey comes late to the world poetry, after a career as an editor. Emotional maturity is on full display in her debut chapbook, A FUTURE WITH BROMELIADS — a book of family ghosts and quiet sorrows. In “Woman in a Borrowed Garden, she writes:
I am the woman in the garden
but this house planted with myrtle
and lilies is not my house.
Here a hummingbird unwinds
a forked tongue into syrup where a wasp
flails and drowns. I would free her
but this garden is not my own.
So we witness “a borrowed garden” of grief: a son who died young; a father who lashed her his “belt but never a buckle,” and “used his toe to pull the trigger” for his own suicide; and a mother playing Chopin through the night, “sleeping children be damned” who descends into dementia with only her music:
She sleeps for weeks
playing a nocturne
in a mirrored hall
waltzing in a taffeta gown
All of this could be maudlin; but Massey’s poems speak of hard-earned healing. In my personal favorite, “Wild Asters,” the poet thinks of her dead son as she arranges flowers. (The elegant couplets somehow suggest flower arrangements.)
how I cheated the first frost
how we can’t save what doesn’t want saving
how I saved a few last flowers
how I couldn’t save you.
You laughed as I trimmed the stems,
ripped away yellowed leaves.
You were with me—
autumn’s early darkness, the last of the apples—
when I thought I could make even dying things
return to life.
The natural world, time and again, grounds the poet’s pain: her “laughing” son is with her in “autumn’s early darkness.” In another poem, he’s the hawk “flying home.”. In this book, we feel Massey is flying home— to a world filled with animals, flowers, family and to poetry itself.
Carla Sarett’s poetry and essays have been nominated for the Pushcart, Best of Net, Best Microfictions, and Best American Essays. Her latest poetry chapbook, My Family Was Like a Russian Novel, is out from Plan B Press. She serves as Contributing Editor for New Verse Review and is currently based in San Francisco. Carla earned her Phd from University of Pennsylvania.