The Channels Between Hope and Doubt, Love and Loss: Carlene Gadapee reviews Dawn Potter’s CALENDAR

Calendar
Dawn Potter
Deerbrook Editions, 2024
109 pp.

Dawn Potter’s newest collection Calendar honors the rhythms of both time and how it is lived. There are poems that are rooted in mythos, others in daily routine, some are love poems, and yet others are acute observations of time and place. Still other poems focus on the mortality of loved ones; yet aren’t all poems focused on mortality? The passage of time, the passing of people and places and hopes and dreams all make up a life. Calendar marks and remarks on these passages, and Potter deftly navigates the channels between hope and doubt, love and loss.

The collection follows the order of a monthly calendar, with poems in each section that reflect the resonances of each month. It is not a strict pattern; instead, the reader can follow intuitively, drawn in by the narrative arc as it unfolds. In January, the poet asks us to consider the natural world: air, trees, tunnels, and forest homes. Indeed, in the poem “My house is a badger’s tunnel,” the speaker says, “My house is a cavern of echoes. / It is as vast as despair, as shiny as coins.” What is a house? A home? I’m already in a mythic realm, and I’m more than ready for it. Then February opens with “moon poem,” a lovely, mysterious imagining of the moon as a room-mate, one who is both unreliable and reliably charming:

…the moon is unevictable—he is here to stay—

& once in a while he even washes a dish or two & his smile

is mournful & gorgeous, like paul newman’s, & his laundry

is all over the couch.

We know that we are in for a strange ride, part mystical, part mythos, with a smattering of humor, whimsy, and pathos, all summed up with a wryly knowing nod.

The poems in this collection are closely aligned with the natural world, so much so that it’s really enticing to wander with the poet-speaker in this landscape that is both familiar (especially to those of us who live in New England) and unfamiliar, we can feel the thrum of life just below the visible world. The first poem in March is titled “Self,” and the self in this poem, the speaker, is deeply engaged with the natural world, more specifically, in a group of “scraggly titmice,” who are withstanding the elements, “clinging to a twig, blood / racing against cold….” At the end of the poem, the speaker asks, “…what battered bird / would choose any fate other than bird?” I’m reminded of Thomas Hardy’s “aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, / In blast beruffled plume,” from which the speaker in “The Darkling Thrush” finds a thin thread of hope in the bird’s song, despite the pervasive sense of uncertainty. Dawn’s titmice are tenacious, regardless of what they must face; the poem suggests that we can learn from them.

Another beautiful element of Dawn Potter’s poetry is her ability to write a love poem that is not predictable. In the poem “Idyl,” we meet the poet-speaker’s husband, Tom, as he is wrestling with a leaky shower. The poem ends with, “Dear handyman, so carefully not letting the cat lick caulk, / I empty this sloshing pail in your honor.” This funny love poem is filled with earnestness and is grounded firmly in real, lived experience. Isn’t that what love is? Dawn’s love poems are always a surprise and a delight; a surprise, because amid the messy and boring and mundane tasks of daily living there is a deep and abiding faith in love, and a generous focus on the beloved in a setting that is not at all “romantic,” but is, instead, entirely familiar. This is also the source of delight for the reader: if there’s love in a leaky shower and sloshing pails, then we can recognize love in our own uneven and stumbling lives.

 Another theme that runs throughout Dawn’s poems in this collection is a focus on mortality; one’s own, as well as the inescapable worry about an aging parent. “What I Don’t Want to Talk About,” a poignant poem that appears in May, is both heart-breaking and relatable, especially for those of us who have been working through the same set of impossible tasks and concerns. “My father may or may not be dying, / but whatever it is he is doing, / I don’t want to talk about that either.” I feel this line deeply. The poem is introspective, but it also contains an element of absurdity, which not only relieves the tension, but also highlights the larger sense of the absurd: what do we do, what can we do, about the inevitable? The sotto voce pronouncements by the speaker in the poem, such as “Let me mention / that I’m imagining dropping a landmine into my dad’s garden” and “At night I trudge in circles around my parents’ yard / and wonder if bears will eat me” are a welcome counterpoint to the tearful conversations on the telephone and the inability to understand or to fix anything— “What I don’t understand is what it takes to save a life, / or how to, or whose.” In this way, the reader is not left behind, but is, instead, invited to consider the true absurdity of the impotent feeling that comes with confronting the illness and possible death of a parent.

 Midway through the book, in June, there is a long, sectioned poem titled “A Month in Summer.” The genesis of this poem was Potter’s access to and close reading of an historic woman’s daily diary entries, and as a result, the speaker emerges as a forceful and sometimes resentful woman, firmly rooted in time and place. The setting is in Maine, 1868, and the concerns of the speaker are both timeless and time-dependent. The speaker is eminently recognizable; Dawn has created this character from her own words but has also given her an emotional intensity seen through thoughts and actions. This unfulfilled woman who “glimpse[s] the half-shape of [her] future”—one of work, disappointment, truncated dreams, and duty—springs from a found text, but is the product of Dawn’s deep sympathy for those who find themselves in almost impossible situations, who must manage, regardless of their own desires. Their often-uncelebrated lives become the focus, embodied by the speaker who says, “I have spoken words visibly with my life,” but who also counters that with “I have nothing to say about anything.” Amid house chores, the speaker’s interior voice comes through: “I am going to try to write / A little. // I have nothing at stake but my life.”

In the poem “One Day,” Dawn uses the constraint of the holy offices; this is not a religious poem, but it is one that honors the self in the real world by bringing lived experience up against the interior vision and voice of the poet-speaker. The structure of the poem provides a framework that allows the details of a single day to settle into place and to focus our attention on what may otherwise be just the mundane routine of living. Again, Dawn elevates and celebrates experience as both tangible reality and as metaphor. This long poem is both introspective and whimsical in turn. At the end of the 6 p.m. section, the speaker says, “I feel a little lonely, // with no comfortable man next to me to laugh at-- / just a cat hogging my chair, and this poem chugging // clumsily toward silence. I wonder how it will end. // I wonder if the ending matters.” And in the 9 p.m. section there is an element of ars poetica: “…in the land of poems everything / talks to everything else, and writing poems / seems to be the only thing my brain wants / to accomplish tonight. / Which is to say I should probably / pay more attention to whatever / loud animal is rustling around / under the black walnut tree.” The use of humor and of self-effacement make this poem truly inviting. Why do we feel like we should always be doing something more practical? In this way, this poem, too, obliquely addresses the pressures that women often feel: we want to follow our passions, but there’s always something else that is calling to us, rooting around and causing a practical distraction.

This is also true in “Those Arithmetic Facts,” found in the October section of the book. The speaker says, “Every day people tried to take me away from me, / every damn day they’d pour in those arithmetic facts, // and after school I fed each one to the robins.” This poem is followed by “in myself I am,” in which the speaker is lamenting the feeling of being invisible, of not mattering all that much: “there is no world like one // that does not know you live in it” brings to light the whole point that it is really hard to be a person who cares about things that the world disregards, and thus feel unremarkable.

Dawn’s keen power of observation and concentration are clearly evident in the last poem in October, titled “What I Should Have Said to the Person Who Asked Me Why the Fields Are Littered with Old Cars.” Dawn is a masterful artist who paints with words; sensory details serve as guideposts, and we find ourselves in a gritty situation and setting. The scene is not pleasant, but it is real, and we are both resigned and maybe a little confused—but we can’t look away because we know this place, this sense of fatalism, this woman “who wanders out/ into the unmown grass, cigarette pinched between slender fingers, nightgown stained with coffee, for she too will be honored to rust in this yard, where the/ mice scurry under the collapsing shed….”

Potter also points to the mythological-feminine in a few of the poems, writing in the voice of such familiar characters as Clytemnestra and Wealhtheow. In this way, the reader can see connections: women’s concerns, desires, and angers are both historic and serve as a trope in literature. What does a woman in the 21st century have in common with these literary forbears? Such things as unfulfilled dreams, children, unfaithful partners, and having to exist within the strictures of social norms are all as present to women today as they were to women of the far-distant past. This, too, is a way of manipulating the idea of time as constructed by human beings, a calendar with a long reach. The work titled “Wealhtheow” appears as the penultimate poem of the collection at the end of December. The speaker is the wife of King Hrothgar from the epic Beowulf, in which she traditionally does not feature prominently, and rarely, if ever, speaks. This poem gives her a voice and re-centers the situation in such a way that the reader can envision the concerns of the non-hero, the innocent bystander who still has a stake in the events as they unfold. She says, “We felt the smallness of our lives: we hid nothing within us. / Better, in such silence, to have been stones or sky. / We were doomed by our clattering hearts.” The poem comes to an end with “Our sons will be heaps of flesh and sinew-- / quivering, bog-dark.” And so it is; historically, women have little to say that will be taken into account, and they must stand by, watching destruction. Dawn Potter captures the mystery of the older text and rehomes it in a poem that allows human frailty and frustrated female experience to come forth. Wealhtheow is nestled in new work that honors the past but is clearly connected to the present, and we can recognize ourselves in this character. We are linked to the text, to history, and to our human community through the poem.

Calendar begins and ends with a powerful sense of longing, and the moments of sweetness punctuate the pervasive sense of sadness throughout. The struggle with and against loss and change is palpable, albeit deftly balanced by Potter’s keen focus on beauty and love, however transitory they may be. These are essential elements of the poems: loss and love, like life and duty, are inescapable and are the hallmarks of both the poet and of her speakers.

A poet-teacher both by vocation and by trade, Carlene M. Gadapee’s poetry and critical reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in many publications, including English Journal, Waterwheel Review, Gyroscope Review, Smoky Quartz, Think, Allium, Vox Populi, and MicroLit Almanac. Carlene also received a “Best of the Net” nomination in 2023. Her chapbook, What to Keep, will be released by Finishing Line Press in early 2025. Carlene lives and works in northern New Hampshire.