All Its Charms

This third collection from Kuipers (The Keys to the Jail) opens with an articulate longing: “Every birth—even the wings/ of the caddis lifting from the river// is a shroud—a momentary hunger.” The speaker’s desire to bear a child entwines with the landscape of her abandoned home, a gorgeously described panorama of accidental and intentional death, from a father’s annual hunting slaughter, to children who play kick the can with roadkill. When this “hunger” takes root in a real pregnancy, we learn that the father has been chosen “from a list of hair/ and eye color, narrowing the field by height// and weight and college major.” Married love comes later and completes the family, as she writes in “Shooting Clay Pigeons After the Wedding”: “the truck’s tracks behind/ us like the drag of our twin wedding trains.” This poem’s eloquent final image, a skeet-shooting bride with “that new/ muscle near my heart,” characteristically slams the poem shut. As the speaker moves through the fears of new mothers into the thick of parenthood, she finds that she can’t fall back on the former driver of her art: “Sadness is so much work. Angry takes too much/ time.” A story of birth and rebirth is not a new story, nor is it always charming. That, perhaps, is its biggest charm. [em](Apr.) [/em]