PIERCED BY THE SEASONS: LIVING A LIFE ON THE COAST OF MAINE
By Elizabeth W. Garber
80 pp. Belfast:
The Illuminated Sea Press. $16.

Reviewed by Jim Walker

It is important to say, first of all, how exceptional Elizabeth Garber’s poems are and how much this reviewer likes being able to say so. Pierced by the Seasons: Living a Life on the Coast of Maine is Garber’s first collection of poems published on their own. Her previous published work was prepared as an adjunct to an art show; booklets of the poems were available so that people could take them home to “hear” the poems once more as they were read. But this volume stands alone, and does so very well! And the poems, as all poetry should, read aloud with an individual and strong voice.

The poems are arranged by season, beginning with late summer, and working through the seasons to the following summer. The passage of time is marked by poems of varying length, and all with very personal idiom: Elizabeth Garber is telling us about the things important to her, in her life, for that particular month of the year—she prioritizes all of this, making us care. She seems to be both the teller of poems/stories, and also the reader/listener, as in her wonderfully warm poem, “An Afternoon of Stories.”

The listening ones lie back, resting,
as they are fed the food of stories,
savoring the combinations of flavors,
twirling the succulent tastes and textures around their mouths…

And then there is the less optimistic mood captured in a poem titled, “That Terrible Weight,” which turns out to be about Christmas.

There is a terrible weight that can settle in
over Christmas and leave it so saddened.

But this changes; Garber fills us with her delight in “Feasting:”

I am so amazed to find myself kissing you
with such abandon,
filling myself with our kisses
astounding hunger for edges of lips and tongue.

The edges of lips and tongue: what a strong and idiosyncratic image!

Actually, the more I think about it, this book reviews itself. It’s just a matter of finding Garber’s lines—the right lines—and letting her tell her own poesy, as when she writes about her son on his eighteenth birthday:

I gave you stories and gardens
and traveling quietly together.

and her son’s father gave him

[your] long sinewy body
the language of strong hands and tools,
an eye for the grain of wood,
a nimble mind to solve any challenge…

Garber concludes

I gave you stories and gardens,
and you gave us our life,
that we created for you.

These are wonderfully fine poems that ask to be read and reread. You also, as has this reader, will discover something more that you needed to know, and it will be a kind of new knowledge—coming fresh—with each rereading. The book itself is colorful and bright with paintings by Louise Bourne on the cover, front and back flaps, as well as on the back cover.

 

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