Book of the Week

 Why We Never Visited the Elms (Poetry Pacific Press 2022)

 By Marianne Szlyk

 

 

 Review by Editor Sharon Waller Knutson

Charming, visual and nostalgic is the best way to describe Marianne Szlyk’s chapbook, “Why We Never Visited the Elms” which begins with the title poem and ends with praise by poets like myself and Jim Lewis, editor of Verse-Virtual.

I wrote: “It’s always a sensory pleasure to walk in Marianne Szlyk’s shoes viewing her world through her keen eyesight and insight. In “Why We Never Viewed the Elms,” Szlyk paints the portrait of her past. She takes us on a tour of her mother’s Catholic college without leaving the car. We stroll through Woolworth’s in the 1970s where there are no black people at the counters, Food Lion during the Pandemic and Bellevue Library during the Quarantine where “Some patrons have/ become ghosts waiting/at Metro’s closed stations/for the trains that no one/living rides anymore.”

Jim called her book “poetry at its finest. It transports, illuminates, and lingers after the book is closed.”

He also wrote: “When I began reading through this chapbook, I experienced something new and quite enjoyable. Rather than reading the poems and projecting my own life experiences onto them, I was transformed into an audience of one, watching a documentary with the poet as narrator. There was no dialogue, just the narration of each poem as the scene it described played on screen. As each poem drew to a close, the scene faded from “what maybe was” into “what is now” with a twinge of regret for experiences gone and unrecoverable. It left me feeling wistful, longing for times and places that obviously weren’t part of my life, but that I had just been pulled into”

Marianne’s own words on Amazon explain what she intended the reader to experience:

“Why We Never Visited the Elms gathers strands of poetry to weave them into a tapestry of memory and imagination. This whole includes a glimpse beneath a mirror that once appeared to show everything so clearly. Two examples are the title poem and “The Roadrunner,” poems that grew out of conversations with others about what they themselves remembered about the incidents depicted. The tapestry includes cultural and historical context as in “Woolworth’s, 1970,” a meditation on the absence of people of color in my memories of the small New England city where my mother grew up, and “Frida without Arms,” an imagining of Frida and Diego as young squatters in 21st-century Detroit. This tapestry contains not only my parents’ beach house in Maine or the Willow jazz club in Massachusetts but also Food Lion and Tippecanoe Mall as these too have been part of my quotidian. But the tapestry goes beyond myself and my perspective (and corrections to it) as later strands like poems inspired by Hung-Ju Kan reveal. Some say that the chapbook is best at presenting variations on a theme. However, even a chapbook is a whole world peopled by more than the poet. “

My favorite poems in the book are:

Why We Never Tried to Find the Elms

Empty tobacco barns stood in fields
beside the highway in mild light
that seemed dim after summer out West.

In the car, my mother was telling stories about her college, Our Lady of the Elms, just a few miles north and west of here.

I knew her stories well. Still
all these years we had never tried
to find the Elms. She had said it was

tucked into a neighborhood
with watered lawns and oak trees,
with spruce houses, stained glass.

It must have been so gracious to a girl
who grew up behind Peter’s Garage
and walked beneath the tracks each day

uphill to St. Bernard’s. I knew.
I had walked with Gram to church
through the tunnel’s stench.

In college, Mom said, she was happy
to sleep on a cot in a room full of girls, to take classes on Saturday, to pretend

to eat lukewarm mackerel every Friday
while the Dean of Discipline swept
through the wartime dining hall.

By 1987, the rows of cots were long gone.
The few nuns left wore pant suits.
With students, they laughed over lunch.

Every Friday the cafeteria would serve
slices of greasy hamburg pizza
that Mom would have pretended to eat

had we stopped by her old school.


Fishing

The grandfather I never knew fished for hornpout in a pond I heard about but never saw.

There my mother’s family spent summers,
less than a half-hour’s drive from the city.

Unless they are fished in clear water,
hornpout tastes like mud, which not even

Gram’s hand-cranked peach ice cream
or Grandpa’s Lucky Strike Greens could disguise.

I Google Ashburnham to see the pond
not quite sparkle under a brilliant sky.

The surface hides mud, weeds, a murder victim.
No one fishes now, and the houses for sale

are far grander than that summer-time shack without electricity, without running water.

The trees are smaller than they would have been before the hurricane, the year Mom turned twelve,

the year she stopped fishing.


York Beach, 2006

On a summer night without even
a ceiling fan to stir sludgy air,
I open the window to ocean,
the susurrus of waves and cars.
People almost my age weave home.
They’ve been drinking at Long Sands,
watching the moonlight shatter high tide.

Lying on the couch to escape
the stifling guest room, I dream
I’m back in my grandmother’s house
where, at 107, Gram’s still alive,
a tall woman shrunken
to an abandoned rag doll
on a beige mohair armchair.

Clutching the railing, fearing the stairs will not bear weight, I climb to where now only spiders live.
I open windows to flashing sirens,
fire trucks racing down Lunenburg Street over the bluster of men walking home with cans of malt liquor from Minit Mart where Gram bought hamburger and pink tomatoes.

I spring awake to the quiet
of an oceanfront house.
My elderly parents sleep below.
Lying back down, I wonder what
my grandmother was about to tell me,
what I would have done next
in this other world.


Woolworth’s, 1970

She remembers the lunch counter
in her grandmother’s city,
half a day’s drive on backroads
to smaller towns in Canada.

She didn’t remember anyone black
at the counter or in the stores.
She remembers ordering a hamburger
like Grandma did, never looking
at the cracked, greasy menu.

She remembers cages
of green parakeets,
the thick smell of popcorn,
heaps of butts and ash
in the saucers on the counter.
“The Long and Winding Road”
billowed out from the record shop
speakers like curtains in the summer.

She wonders how different
this Woolworth’s was
from Greensboro’s in 1960.
She thinks to ask her grandmother

but knows she never will.

To read Marianne’s bio and more poems on this blog:

https://stortellerpoetryreview.blogspot.com/2023/04/storyteller-of-week_21.html

It's available both as an e-book and print book: https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Never-Visited-Elms/dp/B0BFV4BZDF