The Geography of Memory: A Pilgrimage Through Alzheimer’s by Jeanne Murray Walker (review)

419 Book Reviews The poems in this section have a stronger sense of immanence and transcendence. An excellent example is “Walking the Circuit Around the Cornfield I Walk Every Day, I Glimpse the Nature of Creation and Submit to Joy.” In this experience of divine communion through nature even gnats provide “a constellation of dark amazements.” In these poems Leax articulates thankfulness, momentarily free from the darker limitations of human experience. “In “Flat Mountain Folly,” in answer to the question, “Who owns Flat Mountain?” he asserts “Not you. / Not me. / We visit by invitation. / We stay by grace.” These are poems to treasure, and place John Leax at the forefront of contemporary Christian poetry. A collection of assorted poems is a slightly perplexing concept, as poems brought together in one volume rarely reflect any particular sequence, sometimes not even a connecting theme. Most of the poems in these four collections have been published individually, each as an artistic work in its own right. In most cases, except for examples like Kelly Cherry’s “Welsh Table Talk,” there is very little sense of connectedness, although they are often loosely clustered together to give a semblance of similarity or order. John Leax achieves this very well. But the inevitable tendency is for the reader to favor one poem over another, to go back to those that stand out in the mind’s eye. Accepting the premise that there are challenges in evaluating a collection of poems in toto, all these four volumes have individual treasures ready to be revealed to the careful reader. Peter Stiles Wesley Institute, Sydney The Geography of Memory: A Pilgrimage Through Alzheimer’s. By Jeanne Murray Walker. New York: Center Street, 2013. ISBN 978-1-4555-4498-1. $22.00. In The Geography of Memory: A Pilgrimage Through Alzheimer’s, Jeanne Murray Walker guides readers over a terrain expected to be bleak and harsh— territory they might dread to traverse and might prefer to bypass: the landscape of a mother’s gradual decline into Alzheimer’s. The subject is of widespread concern as the prevalence of this merciless illness in today’s aging population has resulted in many families being touched by the helpless despair of watching a beloved parent or grandparent gradually slip away from them, from reality and, eventually, from essential selfhood. The cruelty of dementia horrifies, and we might be tempted to avoid reading a personal account of a family’s experience with it. Despite such reservations when I first picked up Walker’s autobiographical book, I soon discovered that hers is not a morbid, despairing account of loss. Rather, it is a powerful, insightfully written, and well-crafted account of positive discovery— Christianity and Literature 420 discovery or “recovery” of the past, discovery of family, discovery of relationships, and ultimately discovery of self. Walker acknowledges the lessons learned from her mother, Erna Kelly, as she declined, even after she had lost the ability to speak, namely, lessons about “life and death” (xix). Beginning at the end of a decade-long ordeal, with the phone call that brings the news of her mother’s death, Walker structures a journey into memory, a narrative that weaves together a chronological account of her mother’s decline with flashbacks that often lead her to surprising revelations about family relationships and about formative events in her own life. Importantly, the author simultaneously traces her own spiritual pilgrimage that led her away from her upbringing in Baptist fundamentalism into a faith that embraces image and ritual. With a literature professor’s affection for the written word and with a poet’s precision of language and sensitivity to symbol and concrete detail, Walker tells her story realistically but without harshness, affectionately but without sentimentality, soberly but with a delicate sense of humor. Walker first notices subtle changes in Erna’s behavior in 1998. She is troubled by her mother’s painting of heavy, navy blue, “vindictive”-looking storm clouds looming over her childhood farmhouse (13). She feels panic on discovering her mother’s freezer surprisingly overstocked with roasts, her desk drawer in a state of uncharacteristic chaos. Erna behaves strangely at a Christmas party held in her honor. She is vague...