Emily is a Cambridge neighbor, a fellow Harvard grad (School of Design in her case), and the wife of a friend who I worked with on the Board of the Charles River Conservancy.  She is also a superb poet.

In this her second book of poetry, she writes of her childhood and parents in California, her adulthood with friends and family on a Maine island , and her life of marriage, children, and grandchildren with a deep dive into nostalgia while avoiding the saccharine trap of sentimentality.  Her memories are clearly etched and detailed as we learn of her mother’s perfume, her father’s favorite objects in his dresser drawer, and the family photographs once vivid with feeling and now dust-covered and curling.  Her images of time passing and aging are sharply drawn and memorable.  Coffee cups are ‘filled with dregs of shortening days’.  Wedding rings ‘once as sturdy as our promises,/ are thin filaments of gold,/ circling bent fingers that still recall/the caress of newfound love.’ The poem entitled ‘Mosswood’ is my favorite, full of the beauty of the objects which mark our lives and which, like those lives, finally wear down and end:

“The old house stands empty,/its showy garden fallow/and brimming with weed./The broad green door/opens to a window seat/where faded cushions/depict roses and peonies,/forever entwined./Cracked plates, broken toys/and books bloated with mildew/litter the rooms, debris of past lives./Upstairs iron bedsteads face the sea/and a pale slant of light/is clouded by dust motes/dancing through stale air./With each tread the old place sighs, holding on to the stories/etched in its weathered wood.”

My fantasy is that this was a wonderful home in a beautiful setting that provided shelter and comfort to a loving family who have died, moved on, or otherwise disappeared.  And isn’t that one of the beauties of poetry–enabling one to soar off into fantasies and dreams and memories produced by the poet’s words and images.

This is a lovely book of family, place, and time.  The poet’s parents are gone; she is aging with a new knee; her children are grown; her grandchildren are here and treasured—it’s a good story told with finely chosen words and images.  Worth reading and re-reading.