Review
Review of home when it moves you
In [Jill’s] remarkable first collection of poems, as richly layered as the landscapes that triggered them, literal currents and undercurrents, highways and migratory routes and creatures with homing and survival instincts — all tend to act out the core speaker’s emotions, her anxieties and hopes for herself and her child, her memories of her mother and grandmother, even as she tries to define her place in the world. Awe and anxiety often stem from the same source: the bridge from which one can fish also allows cars to plunge from it. The beautiful lake surface conceals depths in which one can drown. Small and large events lead to story, but the characters in it are interchangeable. Gradually, the speaker – in her several guises, now fiercely maternal, now bluster-and-strut male, now mythical or reflecting on the nature of myth – comes to realize that the home which both pulls her and pushes her away is less place than event. Her place lies in time, with its seasonal certainties and ritual assurances, and in which daughter gives way to family, individual to species, to larger, more constant nature. Heraclitus may have been right about that river, but, as with this chapbook, one comes back and back to it.