Valediction: Poems and Prose by Linda Parsons
Madville Publishing, 2023
Review by Jim Minick
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There is great pleasure in reading a favorite poet’s new work and witnessing her long, steady journey of discovery and growth. We, the readers, discover and grow in this process while finding pleasure in each word with her. This is the case with Linda Parsons’ newest collection, Valediction: Poems and Prose.
In some ways, Valediction continues where Parsons’ previous collection, Candescent, leaves off. Candescent explores the poet’s fascination with light and dark–in our larger culture and the poet’s personal life–all of it grounded in the natural world. In Valediction, several opening pieces echo this fascination with light, including the first poem, “Light Around Trees in Morning,” which begins, “So much light, I think it’s caught fire,” referring to a maple suddenly aflame in the rising sun. But the tree has a history, a deeper meaning. The speaker remembers, “Someone once important / to me planted this tree,” and then, a few lines later, “Importance ebbs in time” so that “we’re left on our knees, / in cinders, smoldering ash.” This light of a former love has burned away, and yet, even through such darkness, the tree and the memory of its planter live on. The darkness of pain, like importance, ebbs in time so that one morning in bright light, the poet sees the tree anew.
The garden holds the light as well as the dark and is a haven where we find beauty despite the pain. And, as in so many of these poems, the garden is a place of solace, where “A woman alone makes good headway / in the weeds” in this place that is both “the entrance of nothing / and everything Edenic.” In the end, the poem and metaphor leaps:
… Sometimes I think
light only comes when we’re bowed
too low to notice our leaves and limbs
burnished by morning, our bodies
in spontaneous combustion.
Heaven, the poet understands, is here among us in our fallen gardens if only we awaken.
Valediction, though, explores more than just light. As the title implies, this is also about goodbyes, the poet saying farewell to three parents, to a lost childhood, to a failed marriage, to an aging body. In this poet’s hands, these passages of farewell also offer forgiveness to herself and many others because we are all “burnished by morning,” all worthy of love in spite of our many faults.
One of this book’s many gifts is the poet’s play with form, in particular, what she calls “essayettes,” short, one-page prose pieces placed throughout the book that often echo and build upon the neighboring poems. Parsons has published prose in the past, but never in such a concentrated and collected manner. Here, each is titled “Visitation,” followed by a subtitle, like “Visitation: Figs” or “Visitation: October,” each offering a pause from life and poetry to visit a particular moment. And these prose pieces move like poems, associative leaps that layer and deepen with each reading. “Visitation: Mother,” for example, begins with the poet cutting spirea ruined by fungus, the concrete followed by this association: “Sometimes the field of our story is equally ruined. We are sometimes the leaving and sometimes the left.” The poet remembers at age eleven leaving her “troubled mother,” but now, when she visits her in a nursing home, the two of them “want to get close and touch,” the dementia-clouded mother unclear what happened between them long ago. “To get to her,” the poet literally and figuratively must “walk through the waste I chopped off,” the broken branches of a dying bush, the broken roots of a difficult past. In the process, “a little peace creeps in,” and the poet realizes that “Along the way, I have been both the leaving and the left—the seed and the dung—both needed to till the ground and bear fruit.” This alone could be a powerful end, but Parsons continues: “My mother lets herself stand in the field of some small memory of a daughter she lost. I let myself take her silky hand.” In the whole piece, forgiveness is never mentioned, yet it rises so eloquently in these hands, reaching to hold.
The poems throughout play with forms beyond the essayette as well. Take, for example, “Speaking So Loud Without Words,” which comes immediately after “Visitation: Mother” and filters the same experiences but through different metaphors. This poem is what Parsons calls a “bastard pantoum.” The repetition of certain words almost follows the received form yet keeps pushing that form and the poem’s meaning forward in new ways. In the opening stanza, the speaker practices tai chi, where she holds a “ball of air, more / resistance than emptiness,” and where “the space between [her] hands [is] palpable, / cool at the edges. It speaks without words.” As the poem moves, these key phrases become remolded, the “space between” her and her mother “palpable with distance,” yet slowly, the “years without words soften” into “no resistance.” The two women talk and begin to find a way back to each other so that soon, they “no longer grasp / the ball of time, palpable in its absence.” In the penultimate stanza, that ball of air transforms again into “a space the size of a heart.” And as the poet comes to love and forgive her mother, she ends this poem with wonder: “Why resist the heart’s own / cure, speaking so loud without words.” The “bastard” lines echo like a pantoum, but unlike many pantoums, this repetition is subtler, richer, and more vibrant.
“Vibrant” describes the poems in this collection. Parsons’ language vibrates in the dark and the light, like in the poem “All Night, All Day.” Animated goodbyes and hellos are explored in “Putting Him On,” where the poet wears her dead father’s clothes. When the poet finds “Garden Medicine,” the colors of the garden seep into color each word. And this garden and its burning maple and all the other plants teach us that the valedictions, the farewells, will come again, but they will not last.
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Jim Minick is the author or editor of eight books, including Without Warning: The Tornado of Udall, Kansas (nonfiction), The Intimacy of Spoons (poetry), Fire Is Your Water, (novel), and The Blueberry Years: A Memoir of Farm and Family. Minick’s work has appeared in many publications including The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Oxford American, Orion, Shenandoah, Conversations with Wendell Berry, Appalachian Journal, Wind, and The Sun. He serves as Coeditor of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel.
ID: Cover of Valediction by Linda Parsons.
Psaltery & Lyre 