They by Sue Ellen Thompson
Adam Tavel



Turning Point, 2014. 
97 pages.

I dog-eared so many poems among the first thirty pages of Sue Ellen Thompson’s new collection They that the book ceased to closed properly. The hazy, snow-dusted cottage on its cover refused to flatten, and instead jutted up at a thirty-degree angle as if some bedside ghost held it ajar and stood staring at the title page. As I neared the end, I came to realize that this sleepy pastoral image belies the book’s confessional impetus, as its brave poems mark the poet’s wrestling with, and ultimate acceptance of, her daughter’s transgendered life. Set against the backdrop of an aged father’s death and a rocky transition to retirement, They has its fair share of elegies and domestic portraits, but at its core it captures the power of love to revise self and family alike, and in achieving this it honors a mother’s elemental bond with a daughter she now regards as a son.

They chiefly retraces the emotional journey undertaken by Thompson and her daughter Thomasin as they jointly acknowledge the latter’s transgendered identity. What begins with the poet’s avoidance and denial of her daughter’s true self ends, thankfully, in understanding. And yet, to merely call They a book about a mother-daughter bond tempered by the fires of change would be a disservice to its documentary sweep, its formal control, and above all else, its introspective candor that anchors narratives of upheaval that could so easily mush to bathos in the hands of a lesser poet. It becomes evident early that the poet’s struggle to accept her daughter is the more tumultuous transformation, as Thomasin seems intuitively self-aware from childhood. Poems such as “Painting the Crib” and “Echo Rock” inhabit Thompson’s idyllic recollections of young motherhood, but bear the weight of the complicated moment at hand, and the result is—to borrow Anne Sexton’s phrase—a double image of past and present commingling to foretell the future. Thompson frequently chastises herself for rationalizing the signs of her daughter’s otherness that emerged decades ago (a revulsion for dresses, a Huck Finn hunger for adventure), so several poems pay public penance for the times when Thompson wished a different kind of life for both of them. Thomasin’s teen years provide the book’s greatest tension, as we see in “Moving Out,” an omniscient villanelle that vises a volatile scene:

    All those dresses that her mother bought
    are tossed upon the growing mountain of debris:
    Leaving home is easier than she thought.

    The little wooden lobster boat she got
    in Maine goes down without a eulogy,
    along with the other gifts her mother bought.

    Her childhood is over; the lessons that it taught
    seem distant now and meaningless as history.
    Leaving home is easier than she thought.
   
    Smoke from the teenage battles that she fought
    mingles with the talcum of her infancy
    in the soft folds of dress her mother bought

    for a school dance. It hangs there like an afterthought,
    its underarms stained dark with irony.
    Leaving home is easier than she thought.

    A final trip upstairs and she is off,
    kicking aside the birch’s skirt of leaves
    as if it were a dress her mother bought.
    Leaving home is easier than she thought.

In addition to its central subject, They includes numerous elegies for Thompson’s father—a World War II veteran who spent two years in a German P.O.W. camp and lived into his early nineties—which are notable for their deft avoidance of melodrama. The best of these succeed through their understatement, concision, and aural charm, all of which heighten the somber register. “I Dream About My Father at 87” struck me as particularly poignant:
   
    Someone has given me a horse,
    for which I am certain I have not asked.
    Its steaming muzzle makes me want
    to hold the long bone of its head
    in my arms, but the skittishness of its hooves--
    it seems to be standing on only three--
    inspires mild terror. Clearly
    it is mine now; it lowers
    its forelock modestly and picks
    at some threads in the earth.

    In the agate of its eye
    is the curve of my own worried face.
    I have no halter to lead it home,
    no pasture in which it can graze.
    and yet it follows me, shoes ticking
    across the frozen ground. How
    will I care for a horse in winter?
    What if it slips and breaks its leg?
    What will I do if it dies before spring
    and I have no hole prepared for its grave?

The poem’s dream conceit is simultaneously familiar and strange. “Someone has given me a horse,/for which I’m certain I have not asked” it begins, and immediately the reader participates in the awkward obligation this snorting, stomping gift creates. Throughout the first stanza, we assume the horse is merely a symbolic representation of the father, but the second stanza complicates any tidy explication. The horse’s eye reflects the speaker's “own worried face.” There is no halter, no pasture, and the poem’s three closing rhetorical questions ensure that the poem has an ending but no finish. In other words, the horse is no longer a mere analog for an ailing parent, but instead a grander, messier metaphor for the primordial urge to preserve life at all costs—an urge that is ironically heightened when the life in question seems beyond saving. The poem’s deepening reflects in its change in sound, as the harsh consonance of R, F, and K give way to the wispier sounds of H and W. Taken together, these qualities in “I Dream About My Father at 87” amplify the ancient sense of duty that adult children experience when a parent nears his/her end and we must reckon with the immemorial desire to salvage the unsalvageable.

Thompson’s retirement and subsequent relocation to Maryland reinforce the book’s theme of change and provide an understory, and occasionally some levity, for her multigenerational narrative. Poems such as “After the Houseguests Leave,” “Envy,” and “Falling on Ice” capture the unanticipated loneliness and inclination to inventory one’s own life that many discover at the beginning of retirement. These and a handful of other poems explore Thompson’s new surroundings on the Delmarva Peninsula, where she makes, much to her sad surprise, an uneasy transition. One suspects that it is this relocation that serves as the catalyst for reexamining her relationship with Thomasin and allows the poet to confront her own fears and insecurities about growing older. One of the book’s best, “The Gift,” makes light of this context, as the poem details a flirtatious exchange with a handsome young man on a plane, only to shift focus in its final quatrains to ponder the speaker’s ailing father, dead mother, and her own mortality in one long, lyrical, earthworm sentence:

                  The burdens of the week ahead--
        cleaning out my father’s freezer,
        putting clean sheets on his bed
        and trying to convince him he’d be better off
   
        living near me—dissolve in the golden
        radiance of row 15, making me believe
        that I can keep my father in his home
        and safe until the moment

        that he passes into my mother’s keeping,
        and that I can face my own death
        with the steady gaze she leveled at the window
        just before she died, as if she already

        knew what it was like for the birds that flew
        up to the blazing rafters of the autumn sky
        and for the horses in the field across the street,
        grazing their way steadily out of sight.

As with any collection that nears a hundred pages, I couldn’t help but wonder if Thompson might have omitted some selections. The weakest among these, “Between,” feels forced, with its four rhymed quatrains essentially functioning as a 16-line summary of the entire book; husband, self, child, and family each occupy a stanza in an underwhelming effort. Another poem, “In Philadelphia,” dwells too long on the stereotypical—unshaven legs, thick eyebrows, and spiky dyed hair—as it telegraphically recounts a night on the town with Thomasin. “A Name” suffers less from its premise or the quality of its writing, but feels incomplete at a mere eight lines, as it reflects on the speaker’s deliberation of baby names while pregnant. The poem itself seems to yearn for a sustained anaphora (and hence a sustained meditation) to capture the anxious, joyous act of naming the unborn, but such cataloging never materializes.

Despite these shortcomings, Sue Ellen Thompson’s They contains the music and pathos all verse strives for, yet also achieves the immediacy and frankness of a lyric memoir. Here, we read a life distilled to its flashes of greatest familial insight, with astute attention paid to the awakening of a child’s ultimate self, the passing of a father, and the poet’s own hard-earned emotional truths. Accessible, vivid, and astute, these well-crafted and touching poems avoid politicizing an easily politicized issue, instead favoring an intimate chronicle of kin coming to terms with gender identity. Through her pain and triumph, Thompson allows readers to participate in this metamorphosis.

About the author:
Adam Tavel won the Permafrost Book Prize for Plash & Levitation (University of Alaska Press, 2015). He is also the author of The Fawn Abyss (Salmon Poetry, forthcoming) and the chapbook Red Flag Up (Kattywompus, 2013). His recent reviews appear in The Georgia Review, Rain Taxi, CutBank Online, and Pleiades, among others. He can be found online here.