View from a Borrowed Field by Meghan Sterling
Lily Poetry Review, 2023
Review by Lorren Lemmons
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Meghan Sterling’s View from a Borrowed Field opens in winter with “Stone Fields with First Snow.” Describing “the early winter / like a sleep that had come over me,” Sterling pulls readers through the fallow months before invoking the awakening of springtime and ending with a summer sea in “Body as Palimpsest.” The death and rebirth of self that comes with parenthood is a strong theme in the book as the author carries the reader through the cycle of seasons.
Sterling’s words sing of the simple wonders of parenthood early in the book. In “Before School There Are Icicles,” with her daughter, the narrator hears music in the icicles—“music like tin chords on strings of wind […] and we are delighted.” The delight continues through the poem even as the poet navigates the dangers of trying to get a child to the car without slipping on the icy ground, framing it as a game of freeze tag. The child asks to suck on an icicle and the narrator breaks one off despite “cold threatening to cut exposed skin, flesh of my hands / raw,” recognizing the experience as “a finger prick of good for her to taste– / something of the tree in it, something of the sky.”
Sterling writes of wonder and delight in parenthood, but she also writes of the constraints parenthood brings. In “Mother Mirror,” she explores how her own mother experienced anger (“It outed in hailstorms of rage, as it will”) and how the poet’s frustrations manifest. “Married to a window, seeking solitude / more than I can find, more than is allotted to someone / with a small child” resonated as I tried to scrape together my own minutes to write this review while my children’s school called snow day after snow day. “Children take some of you / every day, along with their milk and bread, pieces inhaled / as they scream into the silence, as they scatter their crumbs in your bed.” However, “Mother Mirror” is not a tirade against motherhood; Sterling holds the tension of all-consuming love and all-consuming desire for peace together: “driven mad by love for her and also craving quiet with my entire body.”
The whole-body craving for quiet is not the only visceral parenting experience Sterling captures in unexpected, tightly tuned images. In “After a Diagnosis of Postpartum Mood Disorder,” she compares the morning to “a turtle’s shell—domed with nerves” and holding “my daughter to my tree bark skin.” In “Shrine,” she paints the warring emotions of wanting the long days to pass while holding tightly to the short years: “How I / would give her everything as long as it’s quick” and “if only I could remember / forever the feel of her small hand.” In “When I Hold You Close, Your Breath,” Sterling captures the particular physical intimacy between parent and child in a way that hearkens back to the first book of motherhood poetry I read, Beth Ann Fennelly’s Tender Hooks—a book that, at the time, sparked controversy among Fennelly’s readers due to her intimate, messy images in poems like “Once I Did Kiss Her Wetly on the Mouth,” where Fennelly describes her baby’s lips “loosened, her tongue rising like a fish / to swim in my waters / because she learns the world / by tasting it, by taking it inside.” Sterling’s lines—“Your voice is the sea / from the belly of the shell, your voice / is the song I wait to hear each morning” and “Your whole body was a small petal / cradling my larger petal” —could also be written to a lover, but instead speak to the particular tenderness between a mother and “the you I made, the you that still wants me near.”
Even as she writes of the beautiful parts of parenthood, the poet doesn’t shy away from moments of ambivalence. She looks down un-walked paths in “Rear-View,” comparing the lives she might have lived and the places she might have gone to “Cheerios and sippy-cups” and the answered question of her life-companion—“his face deep in a pillow as you write this.” She writes of “imagining my way out of a paper sack” in “O Medusa,” “where the sack is […] the hoist and heft of the daily task of work, of being mother, of being wife.” Yet even as Sterling writes of pulling stories out of her “bleary mouth” in “Panacea,” ultimately her experience of parenthood is one of joy: “this constant bright attention / and soft hands shoving me into gladness, that bossy / high-pitched voice ordering me into joy.”
Just as Sterling carries us through tensions and beauties of parenthood, she also carries us through the tensions and beauties of the seasons. Sterling lingers in winter, where she opened View from a Borrowed Field. Her knack for evocative, leading titles is on display in “Despite How Much We Say We Hate Winter,” as we are reminded of “the joy and cruelty of snow, the way that winter contains us / in its endless fields, its massive hands, / the way it brings us closer to our beginnings.” Sterling sits in the starkness of winter, not shying away from the privations it brings—in “Throat,” she writes that the frost “shoves me now, chilling deep to the skin under my skin . . . from the glacial ice that has broken it, utterly”—but she awakens us to its beauty, too—the music of the icicles in “Before School There Are Icicles” and the echoes through several of the poems of needing the quiet sharpness of winter. She also celebrates the coming of spring, aching for the “hard little buds like teeth appearing on the tips of branches” in “After Reading Keats’ ‘Ode to Melancholy’ in Late February,” praising the fading away of the winter darkness and chill with “Sonnet for the First Blue.”
The dawning of spring in the book coincides with the tumult of spring of 2020. “The First Days” begins with a spinning, empty hammock, conveying in one quiet image the frightening emptiness of the early days of lockdown. Sterling’s images of motherhood dance with the anxiety of a global pandemic—“what kind of mother would I be to allow this thing into my home?” she questions in “My OCD Is Now ‘Good Hygiene.’” She tracks time like marks on a wall in poems like “Day 1,000,000 of Lockdown” and “Self-Portrait with Winslow Homer and a Raincoat”: “Four months in, and all is mottled as fever.”
As the poems move into summer, we read of twisted pride flags and endangered species, of ghost guns and George Floyd’s murder. Motherhood lingers around the edges of most poems; in “Loon Stabs Bald Eagle through the Heart the Same Week George Floyd Is Murdered,” Sterling writes of a mother’s desperation to protect her child and how, when Floyd cried out for his mother, “every mother who heard that call cries out in answer: Darling, we are coming.”
Meghan Sterling’s themes speak to my daily experiences—the tug between creativity and domestic life, the weight of global catastrophes in the midst of personal ones, the endless cycle, both external and internal, of fallow seasons turning over into rich, exuberant ones before falling back into winter. I’ve read View From a Borrowed Field three times, and I see myself returning to its pages again and again as I practice remembering to find the unexpected in daily life.
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Lorren Lemmons is a freelance writer and mother of three. After moving around the United States as a military spouse, her family has settled down in her hometown in Idaho. She was the deputy editor of WRKWNDR Magazine during its four-year publication run and she is on the poetry board of Segullah. Her poetry, essays, and short fiction have been published in Psaltery & Lyre, Dialogue, Exponent II, Literary Mama, Coffee + Crumbs, and other publications.
ID: Cover of View from a Borrowed Field by Meghan Sterling.
Psaltery & Lyre 