Jennifer Horne’s Letters to Little Rock (Kelsay Books 2024) is a superb book for quite a few reasons, not the least of which is her supple use of demanding and seemingly constraining poetic forms. But the book’s greatest strength lies in a series of implicit questions: how can we remember and honor a beloved parent after they have passed away? Is the assemblage of details, of precise and tactile (though reenvisioned and written) anecdotes and incidents enough? How can we reflect in our poems the way our perspectives on our parents change as we age? And, as Horne’s book delineates, our understanding of them continues and develops well beyond the time of their death. Can we bring to recognition that the elegy we write for a parent is also linked, perhaps indirectly, to our own mortality and the question about how we might like to be remembered?
Her book, like any good elegy and eulogy, offers her thanks for her father’s encouragement of her own development:
I told you what a good father you’d been,
wished you peace and freedom from pain.
I told you it was OK to go, the way you told me
I could spend a year away from home
in a country you’d never seen
among people you’d never met
because you trusted I would find my way,
because you knew I needed to go,
because although you didn’t like yard work
you were a natural gardener, always
encouraging me in the direction of growth.
And, as in the poem “At Your Funeral,” Horne’s poems allow her the place and time to correct the minister’s errors in the minister’s way of “remembering” her father.
Of course, we can never set the record straight. Our understanding of our parents changes over time, as our own aging (and parenting) create different pathways and experiences for understanding what, as children, seemed like the monolithic almost statue-like life of “mother” and “father. ” The cliché – you’ll really learn to appreciate your parents when you have children of your own – is true, or at least the experience of being a parent brings about a reconsideration of what your parents did and insight into the circumstances of their own parenting. But being a parent is not a prerequisite for a deepening understanding of one’s parents. Time – our own aging – will do plenty to prompt, voluntarily and involuntarily, that process of insight.
Horne’s book might also be thought of as a complex, meandering delving into what one inherits from a parent – far beyond the financial sense of inheritance. Better understood in that moment of astonished recognition in the saying “mirror mirror on the wall, I am my mother after all.” It can be a way of walking, posture, a phrase, a cadence of speech, one’s eyesight, hobbies, food preferences… We are always learning the extent and surprising directions of that inheritance, the infinite and personal manifestation of that hidden inherited script: DNA.
There is a great book that I have been using in my OLLI (Oscher Lifelong Learning Institute – classes for older students) class, Susan Moon’s Alive Until You’re Dead: Notes on the Home Stretch. A particular chapter that provokes thoughtful conversation, writing, and insight is titled “We Will Be Ancestors, Too.” An elegiac book like Horne’s builds hope for one’s own forthcoming ancestor-being. It would be a radically different book if written by a 20 or 30 or 40 year-old. What Horne presents to honor her immediate ancestor, her father, is not a one-dimensional canonization. Rather than hagiography, the complex, full picture that she creates includes flaws, imperfections, failings, as well as Horne’s immense gratitude for the caring, nurturing, good-humored providing that her father offered.
There is the moment of pain, rupture, change, which, even if somewhat anticipated by the child, remains a breaking point:
How old was I? 21?
When you moved out.
Not your choice.
How old were you? Newly 50?
When you asked me
to help the movers.
How old was the crack
in the marriage
that finally went Richter?
How did I know
in childhood nightmares
to fear it?
How did you stand
the first night
alone in a rented apartment?
What made you think
I was ready to handle
the men who came with the truck
and all they dismantled?
Such a moment – as we age and our own love-relationships become more multi-faceted and intimate with difficulty and failure (if not divorce itself) – is part of the adult poet’s attempt at a more complete empathy for the parent’s life.
I think of this book as an extended elegy, and such an elegy is a way to honor and bury the dead. Bury, but not forget. In fact, the burying depends upon the accumulation of details – before they are forgotten. I say this having written two extended elegies of my own: Deathwatch for My Father (published as a Chax Press chapbook and included in the book Elegies & Vacations) and When the Time Comes (an extended deathwatch during my mother’s final weeks of life, published by Dos Madres Press).
A question that arises when choosing to publish such a personal collection of poems, particularly an extended elegy: who else will find this interesting? Are these stories only of interest to me and a few family members? Oddly, the highly specific and anecdotal elegy becomes a more universally accessible script, as we all ask (and in poems answer?) how can we remember this person, how can we share and show who he was? The specific elegy becomes an exemplary way for us all to learn about how to honor our beloved dead.
A parent’s death is simultaneously the occasion for a flood of remembering and a wave of regret for what we did not ask, what we did not get to know – a situation Horne writes about beautifully in “Things I Can’t Look Up”:
Please, if you could, tell us all the stories of Hot Springs
one more time, so I won’t forget any details.
I never asked you what it felt like to be you
when you were young, full-hearted
and mischievous, a gentle boy but stubborn.
The little myriad mysteries are stacking up
and in this age of all facts
I find I am standing
in the middle of the room,
turning, turning,
a blindfolded child in a game
whose rules I’m still learning.
In my Zen practice, there is a koan that I have spent plenty of time thinking about: “not knowing is most intimate.” In Horne’s love and remembrance of her father, as for any of us remembering a parent who has died, we become intimate with a domain of memory and emotion where knowing and precision meander into a hazier not-knowing.
Later, as we age, we translate the lessons our parents attempted to teach us, translating the lessons into circumstances and actions that the parent may never have envisioned, as in the beginning stanzas of “Coach”:
You’re in charge,
you’d say.
Pitch when you’re ready.
Take your time,
you’d say.
Nice and steady.
I still hear
your words
when I’m presenting.
Early on,
they took,
life-imprinting.
I think I first read this in one of John Updike’s novels: parents are essential to us because they serve as our audience. Real or imagined, when they are alive or even afterwards, the movie of our lives (most of it? the highlight reel?) is something witnessed by a parent, something made worthwhile through their adulation, approval, wonder (or anger, disapproval, warning, concern). But we imagine that connection whether we are aware of it or not (and whether or not the parent is still even alive).
Horne’s book is the story of the shift from a child’s eyes to an adult’s:
your gift
was our ignorance
your loss
was our taking
for granted
Though, as I’ve suggested (about the intimacy of not knowing), our understanding of a parent (perhaps of anyone including ourselves) remains incomplete and includes regret for what was not asked, not known, not appreciated.
Our parents, if we’re so lucky, exist within somewhat caricatured roles (perhaps accounting for the popularity of family TV shows that re-enforce those roles – i. e., what does dad do? He goes to the office, a somewhat mystical, generic, unexamined work life):
I knew you by another name,
the one that stays. The name we’d call
when you came in the door
from work, putting the day aside
with your hat and briefcase,
letting us shout
our welcomes, our relief
at your reliable reappearance
from the shadow world of work.
Horne’s wonderful book is an impressive restoration and great document displaying the value of working in rigorous forms. Oddly, as poets, our attention to a form allows unexpected memories to arise precisely because our attention is elsewhere (i. e., on the form rather than having our direct attention on the subject itself). My favorite instance of delightful craft occurs in the lovely off-rhymes in “Look Forward To”: peppermint/restaurant, quarters/forward, passes/blast. The overall book thus becomes a pleasure in form and feeling, a most successful endeavor where the expression of love and grief fulfils poetry’s most difficult and compelling calling.
Jennifer Horne
A former Poet Laureate of Alabama (2017-2021), Jennifer Horne is also the author of three collections of poems, Bottle Tree, Little Wanderer, and Borrowed Light, In addition to poetry, she is the author a collection of short stories, Tell the World You’re a Wildflower and a biography of the writer Sara Mayfield, Odyssey of a Wandering Mind: The Strange Tale of Sara Mayfield, Author. Horne has edited or co-edited numerous publications and taught creative writing in a variety of settings.
What a wonderful review! So thoughtful.