Main Street Rag Press | 2020 | 70 pages
In 1997, Gail Hosking took her readers on a journey through photographs in Snake’s Daughter: The Roads in and Out of War, a collection that searches for a connection to her father, who died in the Vietnam War. Hosking’s similarly autobiographical Retrieval, her first full-length collection of poems, shows us there is always more to uncover in the light and shadow of a father’s death and a mother’s absence. Hosking navigates memory, mementos, music, and food to find peace as we journey alongside the narrator from her grandmother’s kitchen to physical ruins of the Vietnam War and everything in between, offering readers a sense of the lasting damages of the war.
She opens the collection with the poem “Chance and Hope,” detailing her father’s survival kit: “I watched / as he slipped in a round of chocolate, / believing there would always be some / item that would make a difference.” The chocolate is juxtaposed alongside other items like bandages and razor blades, creating a sense of longing and propelling the reader into the first section of the collection on the poet’s early childhood.
From the beginning, her need to know permeates the collection. In “At an Early Age,” she writes, “the war blew / my father into pieces difficult to find, the limits / of language rested on a foggy horizon.” While mothers turned toward each other and “read the future from empty palms,” Hosking turns to lines and language to find answers.
In these poems, Hosking transcends the physical, seeing the fate awaiting her father, using resonant archetypes from Shakespeare and Greek mythology. For example, in “Hero in Khaki Sounding like Othello Wooing Desdemona,” the narrator “watched men parachute from planes,” and compares her mother and father to characters in Othello as Desdemona’s silk handkerchief becomes equated with the “parachute silk turned into bedspreads.”
The second section begins with “Split Frame,” a poem of two stanzas, contrasting Hosking’s uncle’s life, a typical businessman in NYC, to her father fighting in the Vietnam War. In “On the Bus to Da Nang,” the narrator visits the ruins of the war to find “[t]he only remnant / left, a stone wall of a PX, its foundation / like the forts I created as a child,” connecting a younger version of herself to her father. As she writes in “Notes from the Underground,” Hosking hopes she can “bring my dad back by just keeping them [notes] / together with a paper clip.”
Hosking sees herself as the vessel that bears her father’s stories—in particular, Hermes, where she refers to herself as “the conductor of the dead.” As she watches her father return in “Mercury: Patron God of Travelers,” she writes:
They stand under a brilliant sky
As if waiting for the future they already know
Is unsettled, waiting for me to offer help to the underworld.
One of the richer motifs in this collection is the music that softly plays in the background of various poems, tightly intertwined with the Vietnam War itself. In “Lawdy Lawdy, Miss Clawdy,” Fats Domino’s “horn-like voice” vibrates in the background as the narrator’s mother and her friends sit around smoking. And in “Midway,” Hosking writes of the irony of a patriotic song hitting the charts amidst the war.
If the first two sections examine and unearth artifacts, the third demonstrates the war’s lasting presence. In “I’ve Got to Say,” Hosking’s association with music turns from a child listening to her mother’s friends to hearing drums at a funeral. She writes:
I’m sick of that next black car arriving
the drums that keep beating
Like the music continuing into the third section, the lasting effects of war also continue. In “Belief System,” for instance, the narrator grows up around the war and begins questioning everything from Santa Claus to elements of her marriage.
Throughout the collection, food becomes the symbol of love—from the pancakes, cereal, and apple in a “War for Breakfast” provided for Hosking by her grandmother, to the “Vienna sausages and fried okra” her mother prepares for her father. Hosking believes that “All / those dinners and fresh clothes would amount // to something.” By the end of the collection, this love doesn’t come in the form of bland cereal or powdered milk, nor of course does it bring her father back, but it is as rich and satiating as “the form of milk gravy on my toast / or Karo syrup poured over my pancakes.”
In the book’s final section Hosking discovers there are few physical remnants that remain at war sites. Still, the artifacts she unearths throughout this powerful collection reach back decades to help us make sense of the lasting damages of war on a daughter, a family, and a country. Like the chocolate in her father’s survival kit, she carries “hope in a suitcase headed for college,” forcing us to examine what we carry, whether we’re aware of the weight or not. Hosking answers: “Their memories are mine now.” In Retrieval, those memories create an intimate, emotional, and ultimately powerful collection of poems.
Vilune Sestokaite is a 20-something master’s graduate and creative nonfiction writer who explores themes surrounding female embodiment, her Lithuanian heritage, and gender. She has work published in LandLocked, KU’s literary magazine, and currently lives in Kansas City, Missouri. When she’s not working, she enjoys traveling, hiking, reading, and cooking.
Header photo by CUONG_ART, courtesy Pixabay.
