Habitats: Poems
Katharine Whitcomb
Poetry Northwest Editions | 2024 | 78 pages
I lean over tea in the lamplight with my big book open.
Thus Katharine Whitcomb, in the final line of the final poem, “A Poem for the Day the World Will End,” invites us to spend a little more time in this open book among the observations and contemplations offered in her newest collection, Habitats. This deft work, a lyric narrative that walks us “barefoot room after room” through past and present reverie, is divided into three “habitats” loosely linking the poems in those sections. The braid of “dreams,” “forests,” and “hotels” is evident throughout (and central to) the compilation.
The opening poem “Sleepless Ode” confronts, as well as any poem I’ve read, not only the loss of one’s youth, but the loss of how one senses and views the world when young. We can never feel exactly how we felt then because our experiences and age change how we perceive whatever is happening, even if it is a new experience. The poem begins “o lost person / do you remember.” It goes on to describe a period with a person the speaker loved and somehow lost, in a time when anything seemed possible and the aimless and endless exploring of far-north forests was life-fulfilling. Its richness was a prosperity that was all she needed. The poem closes with a wish to be again
in an old wild empty place
wrapped in yr coat—as poor
as we were poor then but there
w/ everything growing together awake
& away from death all the livelong night
Whitcomb’s voice is direct and sure. From “Lines for Mid-Winter”:
I am not young or uncomplicated or down-to-earth.
The future is a candle-flame painted by Gerhard Richter.
The future is a lost dog on the road.
Inside my house a lamp is lit.
Through the window, the walnut bookcase
looks for a moment broad-shouldered and tall, like someone else.
The weight of the absence of an important figure (father, husband, friend) in this book is difficult to overlook. The loss of the poet’s father (the slow losing of him even before he is forever lost to her) and the importance of memories (his, hers, others) appears in all sections. As I lose my own father to the same vagaries of age and memory, these poems speak as if directly to me, especially “After Apple-Picking,” where it’s
Hard to even look at the calendar
when the days all slam down the same:
hard to get up & hard to stand. I bend
my head to the memory of my father,
a young man running beside my bike
In “Losers,” which begins with the loss of a wallet, these lines affect me almost physically:
My father sometimes remembers
from his assisted living facility in Chicago his sisters
are dead and the farm is long sold. But I tell him
not to fret. Those things are not where we can
find them, though we listen after them hard…
Followed a few lines later by:
By accident once I found myself down
a wild grassed-over field-side road in Wisconsin
with no one around and the wind whispering in
collusion. I can see that secret moment more
clearly than any face, as if that place might have
offered me a choice I lost, like a garment or a life.
These lines leave us to conclude that we might be learning also about a life (or lives) the speaker once inhabited—her inner and outer habitats.
While hotels appear often in this volume, we are made to understand from the author’s notes that their names are not real. These hotels are stand-ins for memories of this traveling speaker who speaks to us, the reader, as if we travel with her. In “Sestina for Human Longing,” the poet longs for France:
before I ever saw France & then after too. The memory
of Paris floats the city inside the city, old hotel room keys
loose in coat pockets, lovers & husbands & a universe
of loneliness but beautiful. It’s like a favorite song
that brings everything back. I know you know, reader,
In the concrete poem “Thrush Wife,” Whitcomb shows us how language can sing and rise, even as it is expressing the sensation of being tamped down and repressed.
swallower of anger, swallow skimming above
the creek, lark-flower, sorrow-
wallower, frowner, furrowed-
brower, sleep-stalker
In Habitat’s penultimate poem, “The Details,” the details are, in fact:
impossible, like a dream-
scrap or the color of the sea…
… As the poets die
I wish we could remember together how we spoke of them
& read aloud from their books
how we sat up awake with our cigarettes
someplace perhaps unrecognizable, lost
or destroyed—but that’s far beyond us now.
From many of the poems in this book, we get the sense of looking back from afar or even from the outside looking in. We feel what the poet feels—time is overtaking us too quickly. From “I Keep the Calendar Alive:”
Our days erode the dream
we thought was time. I am we here as I run alone …
… That we all die
used to be an abstraction—I count backwards. We. I.
In Habitats, this open book, we recognize Whitcomb’s undertaking to tie it all together, her need to bring all the important moments and people back into place, a witnessing of the then and of the now, and a persistence “in loving the world.”
Cynthia Neely’s newest poetry collection, I Dress Myself in Wilderness and You, is forthcoming from Fernwood Press. Passing Through Blue Earth (2016) won Bright Hill Press’s Chapbook Contest. Flight Path (2014) was an Aldrich Book Contest finalist and Broken Water (2011) won the Hazel Lipa Prize for Poetry from Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment. Her essay work has appeared in The Writers’ Chronicle and Cutthroat, and her poetry is in numerous journals and anthologies.
Read Cynthia Neely’s Letter to America poem, “Love in the Time of Coronavirus,” plus three more poems appearing in Terrain.org.
Header photo by Simmons Buntin. Photo of Cynthia Neely by Dean Davis.
