{"id":144888,"date":"2020-05-08T14:14:14","date_gmt":"2020-05-08T18:14:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=144888"},"modified":"2020-05-11T16:45:08","modified_gmt":"2020-05-11T20:45:08","slug":"staff-picks-mums-moms-and-mothers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/05\/08\/staff-picks-mums-moms-and-mothers\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Mums, Moms, and Mothers"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Photo: Jane Breakell.<\/p><\/div>\n

In a paper gesture to the fistfuls of wilting dandelions offered by children, and beloved\u2014surely!\u2014by mothers all over the dandelion-growing world, I offer my mother Newcomb\u2019s Wildflower Guide<\/em><\/a>. I can remember Mom saying about certain plants, They grow where they are planted; in her tone, gratitude and admiration for the least fussy members of the garden. Were they wildflowers, which, as Dolly Parton sings, \u201cdon\u2019t care where they grow\u201d? Weren\u2019t all flowers wild, at some point? Perhaps some are closer to their primal selves than others. At any rate, Mom\u2014a Manhattanite transplanted to New England, with a few trying stops along the way\u2014admires a plant that can make itself at home, and I\u2019m grateful to her for encouraging, in conversation and by example, a weed-like adaptability in her children. In his guidebook, Lawrence Newcomb lets us get to know actual wildflowers with a neat key based on simple distinctions of flower shape, number of parts, and the shape and arrangement of leaves; detailed illustrations; and, important for my word-loving mother, a fine glossary of excellent botanical words: calyx<\/em>, spadix<\/em>, corymb<\/em>; bulblet<\/em>, axil<\/em>, umbel<\/em>. Today I identified a backyard flower as a celandine poppy: four symmetrical petals, deeply lobed leaves in opposite pairs. Newcomb describes this flower as \u201cjuice yellow.\u201d He also notes its growing zone, which lies between western Pennsylvania and southern Wisconsin. Someone must have planted it in my scrubby little New York yard, where it now flourishes. I wish that I could keep a cutting from wilting and bring my mother a juice-yellow nosegay. \u2014Jane Breakell\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t read anything lately that reminds me specifically of my mother or even moms in general, so for Mother\u2019s Day, I thought I\u2019d ask my mom about the book she\u2019s been reading: On Lighthouses<\/em><\/a>, by Jazmina Barrera, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney. My mother has a healthy appetite for exploration, and it\u2019s a shame that Mother\u2019s Day this year will go by without some sort of adventure. When I moved to the city, I bought her the guidebook 111 Places in New York You Must Not Miss<\/em><\/a>, which has taken us to locales as varied as the Merchant House Museum and the SeaGlass Carousel in Battery Park. On Lighthouses<\/em>, based on what she tells me, is the history of six lighthouses in America. Some chapters start with a story; another chapter is the diary of a lighthouse keeper. Lighthouses, the \u201cfrontier between civilization and nature,\u201d are places of solitude. But they are also signals of shore and home. This book is a light at the end of the tunnel, showing us places we\u2019ll see and things we\u2019ll do when we can go out again; my mom tends the lighthouse. \u2014Lauren Kane<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Margaret Brown Kilik.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

As my first Mother\u2019s Day at home in years approaches, I\u2019ve turned to Margaret Brown Kilik\u2019s posthumous novel The Duchess of Angus<\/em><\/a>, which tells the autobiographical story of Jane Davis, an English major who returns home to San Antonio to live in her mother\u2019s run-down hotel. My own mother, with whom I am sheltering now, taught me to recognize good literature. Her lessons: Joan Didion\u2019s Slouching towards Bethlehem<\/em>, Marilynne Robinson\u2019s Housekeeping<\/em>, and, more recently, Toni Morrison\u2019s Beloved<\/em>. Kilik deserves a place in this canon, but her midcentury novel was only just published in March. Jenny Davidson\u2014Kilik\u2019s step-granddaughter and my professor at Columbia\u2014prepared the manuscript for publication after acquiring it in 2017. Davidson\u2019s introduction is as intelligent as the novel itself. She explores the history of Kilik\u2019s eccentric mother, Agnes, also writing that the author\u2019s voice contains \u201cthe flat affect and disturbing candor found in the fiction of J.\u2009D. Salinger and Sylvia Plath.\u201d Kilik\u2019s blunt sense of humor could even be compared to that of Dorothy Parker, though her protagonist is able to generate witty comebacks or aphorisms only after the moment has passed. In Jane\u2019s own words: \u201cI was furious. Senselessly furious. At that time I had not yet learned to bone up on the answers in anticipation of the questions. I lacked the presence of mind to retort, and it was useless to depend upon the depth of my emotions to see me through, for like domestic champagne, they never quite bubbled up to their potential but were more often lost in the yellow liquid. I groped about in my silent prison while the moment passed.\u201d Jane vacillates between youthful euphoria and self-hatred. And her inarticulateness in real time draws a sharp contrast to the cruel judgments she makes of herself and others in thought. The Duchess of Angus<\/em>, a joint feat by Kilik and Davidson, is the perfect starter for book clubs among mothers and daughters who now find themselves living together again. \u2014Elinor Hitt<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bernadine Evaristo\u2019s Girl, Woman, Other<\/em><\/a> was the first of my quarantine reads, but seven weeks and twelve books later, it is still the one I think of most, particularly as Mother\u2019s Day approaches. Here is a multigenerational, multifocal narrative about strong women, motherhood, and networks of female friendship in the contemporary UK (though Evaristo admirably stretches those narratives back most of a century). I don\u2019t need to speak of its merits\u2014the book won the Booker; enough said\u2014but it did inspire me to appreciate all the women in my life anew, their narratives, how our paths approach one another and split apart again, and how, with good luck, those paths sometimes intersect in ways that make each thread stronger. Right now those intersections are virtual\u2014talking Chekhov with my mom as she shelters in Maine, sending my best friend a video message for her first Mother\u2019s Day, reading Yum Yum Dim Sum<\/em> to a friend\u2019s kids in Queens (which will have to do until we can get together in Flushing again\u2014I can taste the shumai<\/em>). Nothing is as good as being able to show up on my mom\u2019s doorstep and surprise the snot out of her<\/a>\u2014but for now, I\u2019m grateful for literature that helps us appreciate mothers, and technology that lets us tell them so. \u2014Emily Nemens<\/strong><\/p>\n

I hated nature, Mum, which looked better in photographs; Britain was sodden, as advertised, the countryside tasteless and pass\u00e9 in its browns and greens and grays, and everywhere the warbles and shrieks of birds pealed, telling nothing. I wanted it all gilded and wrought and Romantic. Still, not to be alone, I trudged along, preferring the sounds I gleaned from your patient taxonomy: whimbrel, kittiwake, chiffchaff, dunnock, nightjar. Eventually, among other things, I learned from you to tell a brambling from a chaffinch, and that no, the glint in the distance was not a goldfinch. I read R.\u2009F. Langley\u2019s (1938\u20132011) poems with you because I could make no sense of them. I was astounded by their strange, off-kilter rhythms, their dense rhymes and unspooled syllables, and how lines shaped the mouth in recitation. Langley writes: \u201cTalk to mother. Speak in a natural\u2009\/\u2009easy voice, cruising the words. Cirrus<\/em> and\u2009\/\u2009thisles<\/em>. Thiskin<\/em>. Largesse<\/em>. Debonair<\/em>. Then\u2009\/\u2009oaks<\/em> and hornbeams<\/em> and forever<\/em>.\u201d But as he speaks, the words break and meld: \u201cSay that mother is out there,\u2009\/\u2009and she is thiswise, thissen, thiskin, which\u2009\/\u2009is thistles, cirrus cruising de bonne aire<\/em>.\u201d The meaning remained remote until you explained the terms\u2014Callophrys<\/em>, Grimmia<\/em>\u2014that granted access and denoted clearly what was there. The more we read, the more they unfurled; too often, what seemed to be a private obscurity just demanded attention. As he writes of a beetle: \u201cDetail is so sharp\u2009\/\u2009and so minute that the total form suggests\u2009\/\u2009infinity.\u201d Like you, Langley showed me how to see. His Complete Poems<\/em><\/a>, comprising just forty-eight written over nearly four decades, is my most treasured book, even as it still eludes me. The last poem, his most transparent, \u201cTo a Nightingale,\u201d begins from \u201cNothing\u201d\u2014there is a poet paused in the countryside, then birdsong. \u201cI am\u2009\/\u2009empty, stopped at nothing, as\u2009\/\u2009I wait for this song to shoot.\u201d Yet the poem slowly fills in the small particulars that shape the whole: \u201cRed mites bowling\u2009\/\u2009about on the baked lichen\u201d; \u201cDarkwing. The\u2009\/\u2009flutter. Doubles and blurs the\u2009\/\u2009margin\u201d; a voice like \u201ca soft cuckle of\u2009\/\u2009wet pebbles.\u201d You tell me about the visitors in isolation: the barn owl watching Poldark<\/em> with you through the undrawn window, the jostling of squirrels who lost their nuts, and a local cat\u2019s Jacobean slaughter of sparrows. With a leaf between the fingers, Langley writes: \u201cThere seems\u2009\/\/\u2009to be no limit to\u2009\/\u2009the amount of life it\u2009\/\u2009would be good to have.\u201d I long for the loam, for the puddle-furrowed paths to Grantchester, to see an arrow of geese above the fens, or to wait for a kingfisher, hushed in a hide with you. Sitting by my window, as I think of you, Mum, I sound the names of the birds that pass: pigeon, pigeon, pigeon, pigeon, pigeon. \u2014Chris Littlewood<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

R.\u2009F. Langley.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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