A Review of Anne Whitehouse's Meteor Shower, Poetry Collection When Anne Whitehouse submitted a small collection of poems for The Basil O' Flaherty, I asked if we could put her work in our Memoir section. Whitehouse has both a poetic and narrative way of recording her words that they seem like carefully sculpted columns and articles rather than regular poems. Most of the work in her new collection, I am led to believe, are first-hand accounts. By far, "Calligraphies," winner of the 2016 Songs of Eretz poetry prize, is this collection's shining star, or all-star. This, however much it sings like a first-person account, is not one. The poem is about a calligrapher in the old days in China, but the poet was born in Alabama and grew up in the civil rights movement. There is no way that her father is this calligrapher, but I really believed that the poet was this man's son. Only after I finished reading the poem did I realize No, that isn't possible. You know who wrote this. There are many other hard-working team players in this collection with "Calligraphies," though. One other strong contender is "My Cuba," a piece about visiting your grandparents' homeland, as well as "Less Impact," a lyrical poem about "dissolving / into the air." This collection is full of powerful lines, including, "I thought, if only I could play piano / the way I felt, I'd be worth listening to!" Each of these memorable lines plays a role in building a winning work of literature that reads very much like a diary of someone coming of age and continuing to grow. "Story of a Dress" is a perfect example of this. This poem is about giving up something you love for your daughter. It is about more than this though, because it is also about the art of gift giving and hoping something you moved on from brings joy to someone else. Meteor Showers is a poetry collection well-worth reading, with room to dig deeper into each poem. "/ and the next morning the sun / did the same stunt in the same place." |