Book Review: Jennifer Reeser’s Alabaster Flask

By Terese Coe
from The Texas Review, Summer 2004


It’s not easy to name the emotions in Jennifer Reeser’s poems, because they are often elusive or half-hidden in reflectiveness. She is a canny aesthetician, and does not often give up her meaning lightly.

Reeser’s poems are emanations of childhood, a childhood filled with both flushes of fondness and the sudden shiver of fear. “Compass Rose” uses the image of a “Babushka doll” to open a poem about the persistence of roses as a metaphor for love. Russia’s ubiquitous wool challis scarves, the ones covered with colorful roses, are never mentioned here, but that image is pervasive. Whether it is “pools the hue of chocolate toffee” (in “Tomorrow When I Sleep”), or an Asian figurine (in “The Figure in My Parlor”), or the Demeter/Persephone myth restored to us as our children’s departure for school in winter (“Ceres in December”), Reeser imbues her images with an exoticism that sometimes seems to date from childhood:

Who knows but that the riddle of her nature
won’t keep me occupied for years to come?
A changing continent in every feature,
a satisfying secret in their sum.

(from “The Figure in My Parlor”)

She speaks of dreams and visions, lamplight and painful love, death and the silent telephone, sleep and wakefulness, in a voice at once Romantic and cynical, religious and historical. One of her lithe sonnets about her own childhood, “I’ve Been Pondering Eternity Again,” dares to invert Edna St. Vincent Millay’s celebrated lines about her candle (“My candle burns at both ends/ It will not last the night/ But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends/ It gives a lovely light!”).

Reeser ends her sonnet with a fitting reconfiguration of Millay’s thoughts:

I’d tried to force forever to successions
Of hours, as children might mistake atonement
For nothing more than sorry introspections,
then turned my bedside candle off to sleep,
with full faith that its lightlessness would keep.

Both poets delight in seizing the night, one requiring wakefulness, one requiring sleep; Reeser seizes the ironic as well. Her sonnet received a Pushcart Prize nomination in 2001.

“Singing to Yourself” could almost be a nursery rhyme, if it weren’t a plotless Grimm fairy tale in miniature. The intimacy of tone of the first two stanzas, meant to describe the “perils of youth,” takes on a secret irony, soon to be dispersed:

No longer does the dog
beguile you with the cat.
There is no Christmas log,
no fireplace, no mat.

The children play at cards
on soft magenta floors,
and no more do dead bards
extol their Saxon moors.

Here Reeser’s trimeter is charming, if mournful; elsewhere it is unequivocal and raw. “Cretic Hymn” is powerful enough that it seems to be felt first and read second.

Cretic Hymn

Numb with cold, urchin girls
walked the black, bitter lane
selling match, bloom and bell,
Spanish moss, sugar cane.

Flower carts creaked behind
those the plague hadn’t stilled,
wheels and miens angling round,
harsh as spring fields untilled.

One, unhinged, rolled to rest
near a stone-groaning church
flanked with graves north and south
edging grim, silver birch.

Into these came the cloud
men who laugh, those who dance,
seldom heed, settling down
under chill, wind, and chance.

Virgo, there, sanctioned psalms,
knowing I grieved for you,
while beyond song and grave,
fronds of swamp rushes grew.

Longer dreams often give
solace by virtue of
daylight pain made pastel—
shades beneath sheerer love.

Longer dreams often draw
harder on comfort’s stuff;
this was my briefer peace
dreamed, but brief peace enough.

“Cretic Hymn” was awarded the 2000 Innovative Form Award by Dr. Alfred Dorn.

One of the touching poems in this collection is “For Mother, At Advent.” The procession of images, building blocks creating a small tower of feeling, gathers denser rhyme as it proceeds. The simplicity of this is delightful. One line was unsettling amid the smooth effortlessness of diction and music, but that may have been Reeser’s intention.

Dreaminess bubbles up again in her musical triolet, “Louisiana Broke My Sleep,” and in “Sonnet for Maxim,” about dreaming of a dead child. If it is more nightmare than dream, it is one that taps ruefulness and not terror: “he craved such little space in which to die.” One is drawn in and finds, for the speaker and the reader, pain is assuaged by fluid expression.

“Tanna by October” stakes a claim on the romanticism of motherhood, dark though it may be at times. Speaking of an adoptive child, his mother gone, the poem recalls these lines by Shakespeare for Titania in “Midsummer Night’s Dream” (Act Two, Scene 1):

But she, being mortal, of that boy did die,
And for her sake do I rear up that boy
And for her sake I will not part with him.

With its “uncarved pumpkins,” “white-hot Heaven,” and the dream of a baby boy who “was no trouble to me,” Reeser’s wistful lyricism is full of delicacy.

“Light of Paradise” takes up a sometimes-opaque metaphor for peace and paradise; if the final stanza were more solid when applied to lower-case peace and paradise (as well as to the roses named Peace and Paradise which the speaker has planted), this poem would be more satisfying.

Some readers will also find a degree of opacity in "Double Ballade of Dead Letters," filled as it is with historical dreams, but Reeser’s perception of the contradictoriness laid to lovers and the betrayals laid to friends throughout time is the “figure in an evening haze.”

In “Ceres in December,” Reeser’s central metaphor is fresh, even brilliant: her children leave her home-schooling and are suddenly all absent at once; she writes of this as Persephone’s annual absence. To be child and mother at once, to swing from innocence to wisdom and back, to be grown and not grown, found and lost, at once a “crimson bird” and silent dirge: the reader will find solace in these recurring rhyme waves of terza rima, and Persephone will return in spring, the children’s rowdiness in summer, full-time.

Where are you now, and in what shape your stores
of spirit? Mine are circular, and here,
awaiting you. Mine head across the floors

of space stretched in between us, and adhere
to that resourcefulness which makes us blind
to any doubt more solid than a tear.

Adaptations of Sappho’s “Ode to Anaktoria” and Anna Akhmatova’s “The Muse” show Reeser’s ease with both iambic pentameter and the more unusual sapphics. But many poetic forms become deft and intriguing in her hands.

This is Jennifer Reeser’s first collection of poems, and the winner of the Word Press First Book Prize. The collection comes with high praise from poets and critics R.S. Gwynn, Alicia Stallings, and Gail White. Reeser is sure to find a rapt and admiring audience among formalist aficionados as well as those who are as yet unfamiliar with the success of the recent formalist movement in poetry. This collection is another welcome chapter in that movement.

Terese Coe