Mother Country by Elana Bell

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mother Country by Elana Bell Hila Ratzabi (bio) mother country Elana Bell BOA Editions https://www.boaeditions.org/products/mother-country 84 pages; Print, $17.00 The labyrinthine journeys toward becoming a mother are often shrouded in darkness: the pain of miscarriage, the strangeness of one's changing body, the complicated emotions of new motherhood, let alone the knotty relationships we might have with our own mothers as adults—these are not often the subject of casual conversation, let alone sanctified in the language of poetry. Though the past two decades have seen a proliferation of poetry that deals directly with the complex experiences of mothers—Tender Hooks (2004) by Beth Ann Fennelly, Instant Winner (2014) by Carrie Fountain, and Landscape with Headless Mama (2016) by Jennifer Givhan, to name just a few—there is still a sense that poetry on motherhood exists in its own separate subgenre, as though only those who are mothers or hope to become mothers should be reading it. The imprint of patriarchy's grip on defining who gets to tell their story and what types of stories should be elevated in the form of poetry is hard to wash off. I imagine if we counted the number of war poems in history versus the number of birth poems the scale would tip in the direction of the former. Yet isn't the experience of childbirth as gruesome, if not more so, than that of fighting in battle? And aren't the dark mysteries that entwine life and death in that moment of childbirth and the ongoing unfolding of mother-child relationships worthy of literary examination? I would argue that while childbirth itself is not a universal experience, and while not everyone wants to have children at all, we need non-mothers to engage with literature about motherhood because it enlarges humanity's self-understanding about that mysterious place we all come from and creates empathy around a fundamentally life-changing experience that ultimately has ripple effects on us all. Elana Bell's Mother Country shines a light on that vast and varied landscape of motherhood, taking the reader by the hand and pointing toward the [End Page 109] mountainous heights, the shaded valleys, the dark caves one can only enter with the guidance of a skilled poetic voice. Bell cuts through the dark with the sword of truth-telling. The epigraph to the book, by Muriel Rukeyser, also serves as a fitting endorsement for it: "What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open." Bell, indeed, splits open the world of motherhood with her sharp and searing poems, weaving between glimpses of her own mother's slow decline into Parkinson's disease and mental illness, which renders the daughter in the role of mothering her own mother, and narratives of pregnancy loss and later birth. Poems in this book sing with the grief of losing a mother while she is still alive. In "The Good Years" the speaker sifts through childhood memories, holding up to the light scenes of the mother soothing the daughter's first heartbreak, lighting Sabbath candles by the window, reciting a prayer that "promises God in everything." But after the nostalgia comes the simple, stark realization: "I had no idea what I could lose." What follows are poems of loss: a miscarriage evoked as a "carton of eggs / shoved at the wrong angle / into the grocery bag," a daughter accompanying her mother to the electroconvulsive therapy ward only to leave her alone in the room while she waits outside and laments: "Mother, I've done what you never would do. / Walked you to the edge, and then turned away." Both the loss of an embryo and the loss of the mother one once knew might seem too dark to capture in words, but Bell skillfully walks up to that "edge" and enters the dark with the assurance that poetry can, if not heal, then at least give shape to the voids in our lives. Bell manages to address these difficult subjects not only through an adroit use of imagery and sound but through poetic form. The interspersing of prose poems...