Harvard Review 34
Spring 08
Inflorescence, the second book of poems by Sarah Hannah, demonstrates the author’s skill at narrative and her awareness of its limitations. The poems tell the story of Hannah’s mother, a painter who was hounded by death through most of her adult life. We see her marriage and pregnancy, her quirky personality changes, her multiple illnesses from a brain tumor to cancer. Hannah learned at a young age not to disturb her mother when she was sleeping, for once she woke up, she was in a continual state of need. Drug overdoses and incidents of psychosis required police intervention; medications were changed; the insurance ran out. She was admitted to the mental ward, released, and re-admitted so often that the staff began to warn that she might be locked away for good. Hannah was called to her mother’s side repeatedly as she deteriorated. Soon she was living with her, supporting her through her last days. The poems portray the harrowing events with ingenuity and grit.
Hannah shows a fearless desire to experiment with form as she works to preserve the truth of her mother’s situation. Tercets, quatrains, cinquaines, couplets, most in unrhymed stanzas without regular meter, give the poems a formalized jaggedness. Some forms seem invented to suit the content of the poem. The book moves according to the chronology of her mother’s life, death and aftermath. In the early poems, Hannah introduces a variety of narrative genres to give the dilemmas context, using myth in the poem “Diana, Hunting Words” to describe her mother’s heroic efforts to find the right word as she is losing the ability to speak, and drama in “Macbeth’s Problem” to convey the sinking feeling that accompanies the realization that one’s fate is beyond control. These and the other poems that work as stories are her strongest, giving concrete renderings of events. But most narratives, unless they twist expectations to move outside the conventional structure, must ultimately deal with the reality of the end, and Hannah shows her determination to avoid the despair of absolute termination when she emphasizes metaphor over dramatization.
In the title poem, “Inflorescence,” Hannah tells the story of her mother’s last days. She asks, “How can you, who dosed herself/ With death so many times/ Be terrified of dying?” While the raging woman shouts for help, Hannah tries to calm her with song. Flowers in vases offer no relief; delivered from another climate by well intentioned but unknowing friends and associates, they raise the wrong associations. The pale blue Canterbury bells are the color of liquid morphine, the meadow rue and celandine will not last the week. As the daughter leafs through the dictionary, the narrative of the poem stops. Hannah writes: “I can’t tell you where you’re going,/ And I won’t make up some story.” Instead, she finds a solution in a single word, inflorescence, from the Latin in florescere, “to begin to bloom,” that offers an image of transport:
After leaf and petal fall,
Up and down the graying bones,
The innate structure of the flowers,
You can see it when the finery is gone:
How their blooming plans itself;
Queen Anne—compound umbel,
Exponential, known to sweep
Entire fields in lacy white, coup
After coup of radial symmetry.
These patterns, in the flower and the history of the word, do not die. Hannah can see her mother more clearly in a vision of the plan of the life as it was meant to be.
Other poems that turn away from story and rely on image or metaphor resonate with greater feeling. For example, in two ten-line stanzas, the poem “Jewelweed/Impatiens” takes delight in tinkering with clichéd notions by creating a list of opposites: the domestic against wild; the housebound persona that must be coddled against the extrovert that won’t be packed or sold; the one who keeps low and wilts easily from lack of water against the tall sturdy blossoms that laugh as they hug the fence. In this contrast between a dual species of flower and a woman’s character, Hannah celebrates her mother’s complexity.
—Joyce Wilson
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