Reunion

Deanna Young

• Publisher: Brick Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781771314893
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Women in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Poems that unfold like liturgy, confronting old violence with a trembling, dignified restraint. Reunion is a parable, an origin story, a cautionary tale. It is also a time machine in which poems commune with ghosts in an attempt both to reckon with and subvert their legacy. It is a tale of the impossible quest for the original, unhurt self. A girlhood is re-inhabited and oddly transformed as the adult becomes ally of her younger self. Young's writerly range extends through language both candid and stylized, and to forms from ballads to prayer to Biblical sermons. The voice is often interior, but at times it gains a public character—often through the use of religious language and song forms—and we sense that the child's suffering is in many ways a community failure. The emotional and psychological landscape of these poems seems at once near and far, familiar and strange, uncanny in Freud's sense. Young has created a distinctive pastoral-gothic hybrid; her daring spirit shapes a collection both deeply generous to and demanding of the reader. As I lay there on the couch / I bargained feebly, / weighing each thing I thought I loved / against the ache. (from "Lamb")

Reunion

Sister Pat greets me

and shows me where to put my boots.

With whispers

she leads me to my room.

One window faces the river, high

and startling.

The other,

a crowd of blue spruce.

I lock the door behind her.

I can’t help it.

•

An hour of accusing sunlight

in which I lay out books and papers,

stare.

A walk, maybe.

But the March sky turns,

drunken,

and throws down fistfuls of hail.

The clear stones scramble over the porch roof

below my window

like crowds running for cover

where there is no cover.

I lie down to nap

and the guilt lies on top of me.

•

A dirt road with no houses for a long way.

A truck, growling,

approaches from behind.

Passes.

Two young men,

eyes shadowed by baseball caps.

I hide the pill

under my tongue

like a mental patient.

•

At last a house,

but leaning drastically.

Black cedar shingles,

rotted. It can’t be real.

An iron hand pump in the yard.

I make tracks

through the gravelly snow

alongside cloven tracks.

A single deer.

Fawn coat. Earlier,

her breath on the window.

Blankets folded

on the backs of armchairs.

A table with a red cloth and a vase

of plastic flowers. Lifeless,

deathless.

Trespassers

will be clubbed and dragged into the trees.

•

Sunlight exalts the chapel room.

On the Bible stand, the Song of Songs.

Alone, I mouth a verse

then two. My heart respon...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Ghost Prayer
• Like Bees
• Rain Psalm
• Holy Ghost
• Ballad of the Central Hotel
• Reunion
• Witness
• Ken
• Sleep
• We Gather
• Sheila Margaret
• Dark
• Supper Prayer
• Lilac
• Sermon on the House
• Rain Song
• Tiny
• The Shillelagh
• Whips and Scorns
• Picking Stones
• Titty Ditty
• Gentle Evening
• The Lamp
• Jean Young, Matriarch, Speaks from the Grave
• Baptist Luncheon
• Girl at Home
• The Flame
• How the Sounds Carry
• Nancy
• And Eyes So Black
• Kennedy Cousins
• Recrimination
• What Voice
• 4:00 a.m.
• The Holy Bottle
• Lola
• Riddle
• Visit, 4:00 a.m.
• Ballad of Young John
• Twilight
• Amends
• Lamb
• Early
• Reunion
• The Gully
• Ghosts of Themselves
• Acknowledgements