Book of the Week

To Drink from a Wider Bowl (Evening Street Press 2022)

By Joanne Durham

  

 Review by Sharon Waller Knutson

When I finished Joanne Durham’s powerful poignant poetry collection, To Drink from a Wider Bowl, which I couldn’t put down, I felt satisfied as if I had just read a novel about a multi-generation family saga. Beautifully written with metaphors, alliteration and imagery, the book is filled to the brim with love and hope. I understand why it won the 2021 Sinclair Poetry Prize.

Storyteller Jacqueline Jules, author of Manna in the Morning and Itzhak Perlman’s Broken String. Praised Durham’s book:


Her grandmother “never smiled…but played a mean game of crazy eights.” Her mother “smoothed hurt feelings like she ironed wrinkles from my father’s shirts.” With sharp, poignant images, Joanne Durham takes us from childhood to grandparenthood in fifty memorable poems. The chronological order of this collection allows the reader to follow the poet through significant life experiences in a compelling narrative. As a teenager, Durham thinks the world “is a giant jigsaw puzzle and someone has hidden the picture on the cover of the box so nobody can agree on where to put the pieces.” As a grandmother, she vows not to give up “the search for a perfect world for my grandson.” To Drink From a Wider Bowl offers insights and warm moments from a poet with a keen eye for striking details.

She opens the book with the prologue:

Old Folks                          
    
weather things. We hold our tongues
when young women bemoan their first
gray hairs. We doze off to dream
mid-afternoons on worn, cushioned couches,
then lie with unclosed eyes through the deep holes
of night. There’s a haze that hovers above
dates, faces, places – when was the summer
of the beach house in Ocracoke? Which snow rose
over the sills? Memory no longer chirrs
like an eager bird easing into morning wings, sipping
on rain that drips from every rafter. Time stretches
like an accordion, stores lullabies, love songs
and funeral chords between its folds. We are
thirsty still, but drink from a wider bowl.


The book is divided into seven sections: 1-First Sips, like a spider, 2-New Thirsts, 3- Songs and Lullabies, 4- Unclosed Eyes, 5- Deep Holes, 6- Beach House and 7- Stretching Time.

Among my favorites are:

Crazy Eights   

My grandmother played a mean game    
of crazy eights. She didn’t hug me
or pinch my cheeks like the great aunts.
She never smiled. That’s all I knew then
of a girl, oldest of eight,
who grew up in a mud shack, gathered cow dung
to seal windows from the harsh Russian winter,
a girl whose job was to signal the soldiers’
approach, then ply them with drink,
while her brothers ran off to the hills
to escape becoming cannon fodder
on the front lines of the army.
That’s all I knew then
of a girl who crossed the ocean alone
to make a home for the family, who married a boy
dead eight years later, who was forced
out of the tobacco business she and her husband
started – not smart enough, her brothers said –
who never smiled or pinched my cheeks
but played a mean game of crazy eights.

 
Tobacco Salesman, Hartford, Connecticut, 1931

I saw my grandfather only once, in a crumpled
sepia-toned photo. He peers out the driver’s window
of his tobacco truck, a huge, rolled cigar
painted on its side, Perfecto 10 cents.  A hint
of annoyance on his boyish face, bored perhaps,
driving around the city to hawk cigars? Does he calculate
how many sales will pay the rent, or savor
that last second of peace before he settles
into a ready-to-please but not-too-eager smile?
Or does he memorize the motions and leave
the rest to fate?  

The scraggly bare trees and his bulky flannel jacket
suggest the chill of a Connecticut winter, yet his elbow
rests on the truck’s open window. I like to think
he was about to leave for work when his wife waved
for him to wait, his daughter ran outside
to snap his picture. I like to think his wife will reappear,
You forgot your lunch, I made your favorite egg salad
sandwiches, and his pursed lips will part in a grin,
soften into a kiss.


My Mother’s Kitchen                
            
Of course, I thought my mathematician Dad
was the source of my school smarts,
all those A’s first grade through grad school.
Yet here in my uncle’s memoirs -
Lillian the funny sister, and Clara,
the smart one. Clara, my mother,
who smoothed hurt feelings
like she ironed wrinkles from my father’s
shirts, but never went to college, started
work in the bargain basement
at fifteen pretending she was twenty,
married and escaped into homemaking,
led Girl Scout camping trips
and baked chocolate chip cookies.
I mocked her in my teenage years
for how ardently she redid the kitchen
in a palette of mauve and faux fern.

The smart one. All that time I was satisfied
with a simple language and now I know
I needed one with twenty words for snow,
or one that spells mother six different ways,
and I’m sitting again at her kitchen table
that morning she mused about the gifted class
she loved in second grade, but they moved
for the third time and anyway, she tells me,
she was just a little girl. Then she folds her yellow
flowered apron and steps aside, as she
always did, to let everyone else’s life
parade along the crowded pavement,
while she smiled and waved and cheered us on.  

Six Months Left
    For Trudy

I call because my silence            
is worse than warped planks
of words I can piece together.
Across our crackling connection,
I try to lead her leaky boat
closer to its splintered harbor,
lean into our laughter’s
light breeze - the dog’s antics,
telemarketers, my ever-crumbling
apple pancakes.

I hear the undertow of my voice urging,
please stay a little longer.
I fight the currents
of this final passage, resist
the wake of her departure. Hope,
misshapen as it is, my only anchor.


Sunrise Sonnet for My Son

My son unloads the dishwasher first thing
each morning. I think of him, four hundred
miles away, as I stand on tiptoe to shelve
last night’s wine glasses, stack my mother’s
dessert plates, open the drawer beneath
the oven just deep enough for all the pots
and pans. He says for him, too, it’s a kind
of meditation, this routine he and his wife
have shaped into the contours of a shared
life, fluted and spacious as the overflowing
fruit bowl. This is what he possesses, not
Lenox or Waterford, which neither of us owns,
this man I raised, who hums as he sorts
the silverware, noticing how each spoon shines.

To read more about Joanne:

https://stortellerpoetryreview.blogspot.com/2023/06/storyteller-of-week_9.html

To buy the book:

https://www.joannedurham.com/.