Maggie Mackay reviews Grief’s Alphabet by Carrie Etter (Seren, 2024)
In her fifth collection, Carrie Etter writes of the crushing loss she suffered on the death of her mother. She expresses the complexities of her grief in raw and intimate poems using a range of forms. Her mother, ‘Modie’ (Bernadine), appears throughout as an earthly presence, a ghost, or a memory. ‘Bigamy’ even harrowingly relates the circumstances of her birth in rural Kentucky. Love pours from the pages; the more we love, Etter seems to say, the greater the mourning.
It seems that no intimate detail is left untouched. There’s the daughter’s regret and guilt for feeling she didn’t save her mother, the mother’s regret at not following her own desired career path. There’s depression, suicide, pregnancy. Etter draws us into her family circle: her four sisters, adoptive parents, their nicknames and personality traits. The relationships are illustrated throughout by family photographs.
The collection begins at the point of Etter’s adoption, drawn with painterly craft in ‘An Adoption in 360 degrees’. The adoptive parents “curve to shield” the infant. “From either side the three are one.” This close bond threads throughout the poems. Several recall some of the narrator’s more difficult formative experiences. in ‘The Lauras’, for example, Etter is mistaken for her sister, “the real daughter”. In ‘Overdose’, an angst-ridden teenager whimpers at the vision of an “assassin”, while her mother rests out of reach “half asleep in the living dream.”
‘Cantaloupe’ is a beautifully tender love poem and one of my favourites. The poet writes of the evocative scent of fruit eaten while sharing breakfast with her mother, and later the pain of separation:
[…] I was back in my childhood home, home home
as I called it when I returned to my city life,
where at the supermarket I’d heft a cantaloupe to smell
but could not bear to buy, eat it on my own.
Such rhythmic couplets. The prose poem ‘Heroin Song’ turns to her father’s impending death and is preceded by three poems which foreshadow it. Like Etter, I sat by my parent’s bed at end of life and the repeated phrase “when his breathing changes“ resonated strongly. “I didn’t think to hurry” evokes the familiar naivety and disbelief that a parent could leave you, as well as a vivid domestic detail: the family cats “circled and perched, circled and perched”, sensing the coming change. In ‘Homing’, Etter describes the closeness of her relationship with Modie: “I with my mother became we”. The Last Photograph’ captures the mother’s struggle to smile for the photo, as well as the “love or selfishness of daughters”, describing the need for a camera record as the “cultivation / of a minor saint.” And there is Modie, illustrating this on the opposite page, “the lamplight a halo”.
The middle section centres on the immediate chaos of grief. ‘No, Not Norovirus’ recounts the despair of separation: “the errant daughter an ocean away”. The poet sends flowers but is unsure whether her mother knows who they’re from; she calls out in the final line, “tell me she saw my name”. ‘The Last Kiss’ is a poignant farewell. The leave-taking is long, and still haunts the poet.
‘The Last Kiss’ is a poignant farewell. The leave-taking is long, and still haunts the poet
For me, the heart of the collection lies in the long prose poem ‘Arrival’ with its devastating range of scenarios. These focus on the mother’s absence, blended with the daughter’s memories and intervention of other family members. The poet’s childhood home exudes an overwhelming sensory overload, and Etter experiences a series of surreal dreams. In ‘H is for Hurtle, J for July’, she addresses the painful process of separation after physical death. She has become “I, not we”, as she moves through air “thick as treacle” along the “corridor of grief”.
In the third section of the book, ‘Orphan Age’, Etter buys a ring to remember her mother by, “a memorial on my finger”. She strives for independence while recognising her personal and unique journey with grief. ‘The Modie Box’, using a list format, captures elements of her mother’s tastes and guilty pleasures – French burnt peanuts, John Denver, reality TV. “Is it too late to become a better daughter?” asks Etter. This is a brave and searching poem. Do we mean ‘good’ as in meeting a parent’s expectations or ‘good’ as in fulfilling personal choices? Good as devoted (morally good)? Such uncertainty can be a guilt trap and a controlling device.
‘Ode to Tuna Casserole ‘offers a brief respite from grief while cooking with Modie’s recipe:
Call it mildness run rampant,
call it Midwestern,
call it an homage to
my mother
With one bite, Etter becomes “all ease”. We sense the healing and relief that the mother brought through the sharing of food and drink, diet Cokes and quirky interests, such as her passion for lighthouses – a metaphor, perhaps, for shining light into the darkness. In the prose poem ‘Chez Bernadine’, Etter describes her mother’s collection of toy lighthouses: “Wood, ceramic, plastic, papier-mâché; the artistic amid the kitsch.” It ends, “Consider that tall white one with the single broad red stripe: standing at its base, facing a sea crashing again and again on the rocks below, feeling the spray misting your face, you. You!”
In the final poems, Etter seems to be coming to terms with her loss. In ‘W is for Wedding,’ a single empty chair reminds her of her mother’s presence and absence. In ‘Ghost’, the poet stands on a hill in Bath to point out landmarks to an absent mother who “never stood here, who never came to England”. The title poem, ‘Grief’s Alphabet’, condenses the shared lives of mother and daughter into twenty-seven lines. The extraordinary poem ‘Reincarnation as Seed’ imagines her mother as a seed which germinates “into root and shoot” and exhorts it to “grow towards light”.
Grief’s Alphabet is a compelling elegy to the woman who gave the poet the foundation upon which to build her life. It’s a thanksgiving, both eloquent and angry. These poems enable readers to acknowledge their own personal losses, at the same time as offering insights into living with loss. We are resourceful because of the qualities and love of those departed, Carrie Etter seems to imply. That is solace indeed.
Maggie Mackay‘s poetry has been published in many publications and anthologies. Her pamphlet debut was published by Picaroon Poetry in 2018 and her first collection by Kelsay Books in 2021. The Poetry Archive WordView 2020 awarded one of her poems a place in the permanent collection. Her second collection was published in December 2022 by Impspired Press. She enjoys a whisky, a good jazz band, and daydreaming with her gorgeous rescue greyhound.
