Distance and Direction (review)

Abstract

208Fourth Genre and those compassion-fatigued from reading about victims of disasters, disease , and bad parenting. Those who long for a good book about a good life almost have what they want in Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed. However, readers who want a glimpse of the outside world may feel she has puUed the focus in too far, and those who need a quotient of angst to feel engaged with the Ufe on the page wiU have to wait a little longer. Reviewed by Priscilla Hodgkins Distance and Direction by Judith Kitchen Coffee House Press, 2001 236 pages, paper, $14.95 Judith Kitchen is a collector of memories. Not the big bold memories of national dailies and 24-hour news channels. Kitchen's provenance is of the small and ephemeral; she is an accumulator of the delicate receding shadows that fill the normaUy unexamined interstices of experience. In Distance and Direction, Kitchen's new collection of essays, the author uses her memories as self-referential points in time, places from which to examine the process ofremembering. It is an eclectic, wide-ranging coUection : part travel journal, part history, part memoir, part genealogy, and part elegiac paean to the great and lesser losses of an individual life. Kitchen, who is the writer in residence at the State University of New York at Brockport, has written two other essay collections and is the editor of the essay anthology In Brief. Short Takes on the Personal. She is also a poet, and it is this nuanced ability to wrap a memory within the folds ofvivid and detailed language that indelibly marks this fine and evocative collection. A quick look at the table ofcontents reveals that for the most part the collection is comprised by short prose pieces. With titles such as "Red," "Blue," "White," "YeUow," and "Black," it would be easy to presuppose that the collection is but an extended series of impressionistic pieces, a lyrical non-narrative prose poem that values mood and image above story. However, these shorter pieces—more tonal in nature, brief, lucid perambulatory excursions that provide depth and context for the balance of the book—are also the most poetic. "This afternoon Venetian blmds let in their ladders of Ught, blurred at the edges, bleached, like the land itself, covered in snow, the trees blown ragged and restless. Stray branches snap in the wind and scud across the yard. Everything is on hold. Evening comes early, fiUing the window," Book Reviews209 writes Kitchen in her essay "White."A reader (or at least this reader) cannot help but unconsciously supply suggested Une breaks whüe moving through the vivid sentences, as in her essay "Lacrimosa" where Kitchen describes a springtime field from her chüdhood: "In the hedgerows, forsythia. Whole skirts ofyeUow. It takes time to imagine each bush fiUing with leaves that rise and droop into a fountain, defining a space underneath, circle of shade, where a chüd could hide aU morning in a whisper of green." It is in her longer essays that Kitchen shifts from the lyrical to a more narrative voice, and these are the strongest pieces in the coUection. In the tide essay, "Distance and Direction," the author writes about her father's death, not so much about the death itself, but about the process of his dying. "Distance" is the operative word here, the "distance between 1911 in Alma Michigan" (where her father was born) and Baltimore, Maryland (where he died). There is also the distance of his final iUness and death in a Baltimore ICU at the same time that his daughter is busy attending her son's wedding 3,000 miles away. And then there are the more incalculable distances, the silent, emotional distances that separated a father and a daughter over a lifetime . "Here's what I think," Kitchen writes before deftly and unobtrusively shifting into the third person. "If she had stood there in that moment, or the moments after, when he was both there and not there, she would not have moved. She would not have cried or kissed or whispered or touched or entreated. It would have felt familiar, that abandonment." In "Out ofPlace: Reading...