The Bear’s Mouth: Poems
By Laura Stott
Lynx House Press | 2024 | 116 pages
How do we capture the dimensions of the human experience? How do we explain exquisite loss and grief? For centuries, humankind has used myth to plumb these depths, to witness and to remind audiences how connected we all are to the griefs, wonders, and truths we share. No less powerful or instructive is personal myth-making, a kind of storytelling that allows the writer to explore the complexities of their own life and loss while tapping into the collective human story. And in the tradition of ancient myths, they often engage the natural world.
A powerful example of this is Laura Stott’s gorgeous new poetry collection The Bear’s Mouth. A song of the micro and macro in the world (ants, bees, babies and glaciers, whales, wooly mammoths), the infinitesimal and the infinite, the transient and the eternal, each of these poems pulses with a vibrant love and reverence for life. As in her previous collections, Stott turns her motherly and artistic lens toward the world. But at the center of this collection hulks a figure that haunts every page. The bear, both real and mythological, seems to stalk every poem, nearly every line, and embodies great power and great tenderness. As introduced in one of the first poems, “Reaching Inside,” the bear and the poet’s daughter are inextricably linked.
In the book of myths, a little girl with brown hair, pigtails, runs through the woods, trailing a line of flowers behind her….
And later:
In this story, the girl runs into the meadow with her flowers where she sees the bear, one large enough for her to crawl inside.
And so begins the myth that sits at the core of this collection. The girl, it seems, gets lost, presumably inside the bear, and remains lost throughout the rest of the collection. She represents Stott’s second daughter who developed a rare condition in utero and did not make it to birth. This, we realize, is the loss and the pain that is ever-present not only in the poems but in the presence and wonder of the bear.
The bear’s presence is both literal and metaphorical, a caretaker and mother, but also the Cerberus of the Underworld of Stott’s imagination. The bear is a keeper, both of community and intelligence but also of protection, even violence. And, in many of the poems, the bear and Stott are both the keepers of the lost child.
The titles of several poems reflect this obsession with the bear: “Tracking the Bear,” “Talking to the Bear,” “Inside the Bear,” “The Bear’s Heart,” “The Bear’s Mouth,” “The Bear’s Claw,” and “When You Crawl Outside of the Bear.” Other titles reflect a search to find her daughter: “Reaching Inside,” “Beneath” (two have this title), “Opening,” “What Is Never Dead,” and “Living Forever.”
Stott’s poems consistently stack up layers: worlds inside of worlds, inside of bears, inside of small hearts that are beating somewhere above and beneath it all. In “Reaching Inside,” the poem moves between myth, metaphor, and reality. A mother following her child becomes a woman hiking, finding a bear, and asking the question that seems to be at the heart of the whole book: “Do you have her?”
What Stott does best is embrace mystery and the fragmented beauty that comes to us on the back of grief. And her poems frequently wander in expansiveness, with people and objects seeping out of their physical confines and becoming something else entirely.
In the haunting pantoum “Beneath,” the missing daughter becomes a whale, a blue jay, a buddha. With each creature, a new feature and a new grief arises.
I could hear the whale sing, the sound of her coming up for air
Across the fjord—like a light signaling on the other side.
A forever wonder, the sound of that voice.
And later,
The texture of my own fingertips is all I have left.
Suddenly a blue jay wakes the world as
a container for her, after she died inside me.
Sometimes I want to believe it’s her on the trail I’m hiking—
a sudden bluejay that wakes the world, like
the whales that surface to let us know they are there.
Sometimes I want to believe it is her on the trail hiking—
I’m here I’m here, how beautiful it all is,
like the whales that surface to let us know they are there.
All the moments I wish I could go back and live again:
I’m here I’m here. How beautiful her sisters’ laughter.
My baby’s fingers were pressed together like a Buddha.
All the moments I wish I could go back and live again.
I would ask the nurse to monitor the heartbeat until its last.
My baby’s fingers were pressed together like a Buddha
who breathes out a sigh like the largest living animal on earth.
Stott’s collection reaches toward the innumerable and the ineffable. The body, it seems, is a receptacle for the everlasting, only slightly, even momentarily, contained. It can hold and experience countless lives. This is set up perfectly in the first poem of this collection, “Safe Keeping,” where the poet meditates on a bird’s nest in a jar, fossils, layers of shale, waves, and pregnancy:
Gravity carries it all
towards the center of the earth,
and the tide, towards some other center—
something in the sky, without a sea,
but numerous shores
“Numerous shores” are suggested in nearly every poem. In “Deliverance,” the poem breaks into three stanzas, one about death, one about containment and grief, the last about deliverance. In the third stanza, Stott begins with the poignant question,
What is birth
but crossing boundaries?
Boundaries, it seems, while real and defining, can also be more fluid, more complex, than we generally allow them to be. And while death must also be a crossing of boundaries, so is each grief, each joy, each individual moment of our lives. We are endlessly crossing boundaries, becoming and being made new.
The poem ends with this sharp admission, reflective of those “numerous shores”:
Somewhere inside all of us
an imminent crossing,
the song and sound of ocean waves
crashing against the shore.
I cannot think of a recent poetry collection that grapples with grief and beauty in such a startlingly fresh way. Stott’s style, her voice, her attention to complexity and wonder make her a perfect poet for our time.
Sunni Brown Wilkinson is a poet and essayist. She is the author of the poetry collections Rodeo (winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, Autumn House Press, 2025) and The Marriage of the Moon and the Field (Black Lawrence Press, 2019) and the chapbook The Ache & The Wing (winner of the Sundress Chapbook Prize, 2021).
Read poetry by Sunni Brown Wilkinson appearing in Terrain.org: “Teapot Lake on the Head of a Pin” and “For the Skunk Who Lives in the Woodpile I Pass on My Morning Walk.”
Header photo by Erik Mandre, courtesy Shutterstock.
