The Homes We Live In: A Review of The Daughter's Almanac by Katharine Whitcomb

When I first read Katharine Whitcomb's The Daughter's Almanac, I was in my third year at my MFA program, and I was looking for poetry of place to inspire my own writing. Whitcomb's collection demonstrated to me how a book about place could stretch beyond that to incorporate themes of loss, of the reactions to that loss, and of the way that places, people, even pets can reify that grief. In re-reading this collection, I am reminded of the complexity of Whitcomb's work. Place, or the movement through place, reflects the way in which we move through grief, isolation, and the longing for companionship as if these, too, are places we visit and houses we live in.

Whitcomb's book, and winner of the 2014 Backwaters Prize, opens with the death of the poet's mother. This first section is one of the shorter sections in the collection, and yet what happens here infuses every other section. From this loss, part two seems to develop a heartbreaking but necessary solitude. In writing about grief and memory, Whitcomb often makes use of her imagistic talents and relates the emotional experiences of the speaker through striking figurative language. In "Ghost," the first poem in the collection, Whitcomb writes, "by the filing cabinet in my small office / I try to eat cold soup, soft summer / dusk at the windows & I feel her." Later in this section, the poem "Balfour" further addresses this great loss and the grief that impacts the speaker and her father: "After my mother died, my father would not row our boat with me / although I needed his help. We shivered out in the great water." Abrupt transitions signify the way in which loss affects the family dynamic. This strained, or perhaps careworn, relationship is more evident later when Whitcomb writes, "I said that he must try to take a turn with the oars / then lowered myself over the side." By setting this tone, by establishing early on the sense of loss, the effects of grief, Whit-comb signals to her readers that the work in this collection stems from that initial loss.

The second part of the collection, titled "Claret and Gold," further develops this theme but also demonstrates the complexity of that grief by allowing the speaker to contemplate God, isolation, and memories. In the second section of the long poem "Vermont Suite," the speaker, replying to a series of questions drawn from Hamlet, states: "Sometimes I look around a room at all the faces and love each one in my old way. / Then, the good minute goes." Later, in part four of that poem, she writes, "I love every- / thing on earth even more in memory." And in "Tis Bitter and I am Sick at Heart," the speaker states, "these haunted winter nights vast / as mansions boomerang with memory." In each of these examples, Whitcomb lingers on memory. Even love, which is indeed present in these memories, becomes part of the past. As part two draws to a close, Whit-comb circles back to the place where this section began. In "Against Melancholy" Whitcomb directly acknowledges the ideas examined throughout the second section of her book: loneliness and melancholy. There's almost a sense that the previous poems avoided these ideas while also showing us that the speaker has been dealing with profound isolation. Here, at last, the poet is able to face the feelings present throughout previous works. The sense, for instance, of being alone even when "animals and lovers sleep next to you, / under your mother's quilt." Even in poems where the remembering takes a more narrative approach, as in "This Is Your Brain on Physics" or "The Plan of Ms. Wenz to Marry Up," there are moments of intense longing either for a time that has passed or for a kind of companionship that seems perpetually evasive.

In...