Antioch Review
Spring 2008. Volume 66, No. 2.
Sarah Hannah, Inflorescence. Tupelo Press, 2007.
Reviewed by Jane Satterfield, Loyola College
The fecund image of an abandoned garden “Locked, strung/With pollens, stirred by bees” and haunted by “the figure of the woman/The recent flutter of hands” opens Sarah Hannah’s second book, Inflorescence, a compelling distillation of tragedy into densely musical verse. An accomplished Expressionist painter whose work graces the book’s cover, the poet’s mother, Renee Rothbein, suffered for years from debilitating mental illness. A witty and fierce memoir-in-verse, Inflorescence centers on Hannah’s dual role as daughter/caretaker during her mother’s terminal illness. Within her elegiac lyrics, Hannah details with lyric precision suffering’s effect even as she commemorates a gifted presence: the poet’s mother is a woman, who even in illness, can name “every herb you grow so expertly/In pots behind your place.”
Rothbein’s skills in gardening and love of the natural world become the lens through which Hannah deftly recreates a life’s unraveling. The language of flowers, then, provides a powerful metaphoric backdrop on a complicated mother/daughter history, one infused with rue but also love. In “Common Creeping Thyme (Serpillum a serpendo)”, for instance, Hannah links the herb’s “feeble tendrils” with its verbal twin: time, the element that “tricks and trumps us/ropes us/In” whose quick pace wheels like “this anarchic ER’s rolling cots” where her mother lies “in a corner weeping dactyls (AH ha ha)” after another of her “episodes: an overdose/Borderline lethal.” “If love’s/Time’s fool,” the poet tells us “I’m full-on schmuck, lured rushing back/Two state lines. . . “
Elsewhere Hannah speaks plainly of physical realities faced in home hospice (described as a brambled field “without end/wider than a gate, athrum with/Insect wing and squawk”)—administering morphine, the “Flying nun” who “soars/From syringe to vaulted chamber” to release “the tone-deaf choir” in the patient’s chest. In the book’s title poem Hannah wonders, “How can you, who dosed yourself/With death so many times, be terrified/Of dying?” While Rothbein shouts for “Mum,” her “rotund English mother,” Hannah reads aloud from Cymbeline or the dictionary, seeking names for the vased flowers brought by visitors. “I can’t tell you where you’re going,” the poet states, “And I won’t make up some story.”
In Infloresence, rhyming couplets, Sapphics, and even Anglo-Saxon forms are used with verve; Hannah’s poetic versatility shines throughout this powerful collection. The book’s final section is artfully interspersed with surprising digressions: “An Elegy for Bells,” Rue d’Aiguillon, Quebec City” and “The Riddle of the Sphinx Moth” and “First Singing Lesson Ever, at Forty,” all tributes to the title’s resonance and Hannah’s rich poetic legacy. Hannah’s sudden death in May, 2007 cut short a fuller flowering of her own promise (Rachel Wetzsteon’s memoriam is a lovely addition to the book).
Longing Distance, Hannah’s first collection, was a semi-finalist for the Yale Younger Poets Prize before appearing on Tupelo in 2004. Hannah was not only a poet but a gifted critic (earning a Ph.D. in literature from Columbia University); at the time of her death she was only beginning to become as well known as her work deserved, publishing in journals such as Southern Review, Western Humanities Review, and Harvard Review. A powerful tribute to the lives of a talented mother and daughter, Infloresence pays lasting tribute to Hannah’s finely-tuned craft.
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