Hortensia: another name for the hydrangea flower. It's also the poet's ancestor who was a follower of Joseph Smith. After Smith's death, and when that Church accepted polygamy, Hortensia broke with Brigham Young and followed Joseph Smith's widow. That belief system ended with Hortensia, it seems. Merchant is a non-practicing Catholic. In this collection, Merchant explores the connection of generations through time.
In profound, lilting lines that feel as though they ought to appear on glossy photo paper surrounded by peonies - cozy like a coffee shop but trendy like an interior design magazine - Merchant seeks to tie the mundane motions of her everyday life back to Hortensia to empathize with her. How do the tiny details of living repeat across generations? How can ancestors we never knew bring comfort when we learn significant news? Merchant asks these questions of Hortensia. Although the book is composed of prose-poem meditations that are mostly inward-focused, the overall effect feels like an attempted conversation. Where Hortensia fails to speak in return, the poems tend to read as letters to Hortensia, rather than as mere thoughts.
This is one of the best collections of poetry I've read this year.
Lines that stood out:
"I want to ask the hard questions, but they sharpen back to god." - "Invocation"
"Were you given the smallest room in the house of your own life? I am gifted a single window." - "Helpmeet"
"A woman's work, I was taught, was to endure. ... A woman must remain pure." - "Applying to Sainthood"
"Now no daughter will seed. I will be scraped clean." - "Merciful"
"I am learning the landscape of my lineage now... I'd like to find more than a name to hang in the rearview mirror." - "Picking Wild Berries"
"What notes still play in my blood? What warnings?" - "Score"
"I take your silence as permission to continue." - "Famine"
"Hymn" - the whole poem
"To sink into the earth is a gift ... a kind of holiness ruptured." - "Have You Branded an Animal that You Did Not Know to Be Your Own?"
"Salvation" - the whole poem
"This year I am hungered down to bones." - "How to Describe Winter"
"Regret is a scratch of light between trees." - "Watching the Praire Fires as Pastime"
"The abyss I feel in my bones." - "Portraiture: Dark Room, Self in the Mirror"
"My interior is unchurched. ... the way the wind is tongue-tied at the mountain base." - "Love"
"The testimony of wreckage, beautiful." - "Harmonies"
"The only thing that matters is what comes after the last word." - "Invocation" and "Revision"
Disclosure notice: I received an Advance Review Copy of the book to read and write this review. No money was exchanged.
