Abbie Kiefer
Certain Shelter
June Road Press
Reviewer: Elisabeth Adwin Edwards
Once in a rare while, a poet’s book finds its way into the hands of a reader and upon finishing it the reader’s world feels changed somehow, charged with new meaning. Perhaps it’s that the themes in the work resonate with the reader so keenly; perhaps it’s the poet’s quiet command of craft, her uncanny ability to summon a sense of place, to elevate ordinary to extraordinary. Reader, I am that lucky reader, and Abbie Kiefer’s debut collection, Certain Shelter, is the book.
Kiefer was born and raised near Gardiner, Maine, but now lives and works in New Hampshire. I’m a native of small-town Massachusetts who spent the winter weekends of my childhood in New Hampshire. We have both, in recent years, lost our mothers. I recognize the interior/exterior landscapes she paints in these poems, poems that navigate personal and collective loss as echoed through a New England town’s time-worn transformation; poems of memory, mothering and being mothered, and finding shelter in grief’s aftermath.
In “All These Things I Can’t Remember,” Kiefer, a wife and mother to two small boys, evokes a scene of domestic life: the speaker’s husband makes waffles as she fills in a crossword (“I consider relinquishment, / 10 down”) and their children enthusiastically play with toy cars. She confesses, “These days // feel like the only ones I’ve known. Each day before done // by someone else.” Yet moments later she reveals,
… I had another family,
in another house, where I was loved into who I am,
where I can still locate
the nail clippers, clean sheets, measuring
spoons, my old set of keys …
She recalls images from when her mother was still alive, a life that now exists only in memory: “My mom there in dimness, in swallowing / pajamas. In those weeks when the Tarceva stopped working // for good. That’s where I remember her.” But: “Not grading papers in the kitchen” and “Never weeding the tenuous // cosmos.” The poet continues: “It’s not possible, even if I try, to remember // her in the window, / waving ….” Kiefer’s apophatic sensibility here—how she alludes to something by denying it—works so effectively in highlighting the fallibility of memory and our fears of losing what lies “At the edge of recollection.” Whether she is writing of a home that once was, an old mill, a closed-down shoe factory, an abandoned railroad track, Kiefer brilliantly conjures that which New York Times essayist Verlyn Klinkenborg calls “the strange sense of knowing [one’s] way around a world that can no longer be found.”
Anchoring the book are several “A Brief History of …” poems that address her family’s past and the town’s past, the forgotten industries that once fortified it, its ghosts and vestiges. Many of these are written in prose; they function both as reportage (at one time, Kiefer was a reporter for the local paper) and as lyric rooms. Kiefer’s language reflects her Yankee roots: spare yet precise, unsentimental yet tender (the words tender/tenderness are threaded throughout the book), and always gorgeous.
In “A Brief History of Agriculture in Aroostook County, Maine” (upon first reading I was immediately reminded of Heaney’s “Digging”), the speaker tells the story of her mother as a young girl who, according to her aunt, refused to help the other children pick potatoes during the fall harvest; instead, “she stood on a potato barrel and sang.” Kiefer hints at the relative ease and comfort of her own childhood, that she didn’t have to learn “hard labor’s lessons.” “What does that say about me?”, she asks. “My lack of practice with an empty basket. That an upended barrel doesn’t stir me to sing.”
The poet introduces us to another writer in “A Brief History of E.A. Robinson and the Train Station in Gardiner, Maine,” Pulitzer-prize winner Robinson, born in 1869 and a native of Gardiner, who lived at a time when the town “made paper: manila, newsprint, onionskin for Bibles.” Now, she writes, “Those mills along the Cobbossee are gone.” E.A. eventually left his mother and childhood home for New York; Kiefer compares E.A.’s departure to her own: “My mother grieved … If I’d known what I called home would be lost to me twice.”
“I was so tender,” Kiefer reveals in “A Brief History of the Sisters of Mercy in Portland, Maine.” She recalls nursing her second child just after her mother died. When the hospital offered to send a chaplain, one of the few remaining Sisters, she declined. She confides, “I … Should have let her witness my conversion. From mothered to not. Let her cradle my baby while I rocked.”
Nostalgia is difficult territory for a poet to explore without slipping into the maudlin, but Kiefer succeeds, using old television shows as windows into her own grief. In these poems, M*A*S*H’s Hawkeye cracks a joke after learning his home has burned as Radar finds “a way to mother himself,” Jeopardy contestants struggle for answers (“Does your own gut cavern like kettle drum when, in the last round, players find themselves at a loss?”), and Bob Ross, in painting a landscape, “cuts in like a hush / and puts up a cabin. Shows us how / he’d like to live.” Kiefer allows these characters to mourn along with her, to console, to strive, to make “Something honeyed / that holds.”
In closing, I’ll share a section of Certain Shelter’s opening poem, “In Praise of Minor,” one of the most beautiful odes I have ever read:
… Praise minor chords
that have consonance. A sadness
that resolves. Let’s praise minor
inconveniences. The onions quick-
slipped from a sandwich, set down
on a sweetheart’s waiting plate.
In the kitchen they made the line cook cry.
Praise minor tributaries,
all that sliding water giving itself
to another.
And indeed, this is a collection that honors the everyday: the value of work, of comfort, what it is to endure, “To make do so long it feels like devotion.” In Kiefer’s poems, even when the world is burning, as “Fallen tree limbs” are “gathered and accepted // with such hunger,” “We watch the branches go / brilliant. Take their sure chance to rebloom.”
