Mothers Over Nangarhar by Pamela Hart

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mothers Over Nangarhar by Pamela Hart Tracy Crow (bio) mothers over nangarhar Pamela Hart Sarabande Books https://www.sarabandebooks.org/titles-20192039/mothers-over-nangarhar-pamela-hart 80 pages; Print, $15.95 In 2012, I sent out a call for memoir submissions that would appear in an anthology two years later as Red, White, and True: Stories from Veterans and Families, World War II to Present. The intent for this book had been to create a more circular representation of military service and its cross-generational impact as influenced by combat experiences, moral injury, survivor's guilt, even the lasting impact of military traditions and customs on the psyche. Frankly, the whole idea was little more than a hunch at the time. My editor and writer-friends asked why it was necessary to include the voices of family members. Wouldn't it be easier just to include essays by veterans? Probably. But as a Marine Corps veteran with no military family background and the author of a new military memoir, my curiosity had been stirred years earlier after hearing memoirist and poet Rebecca McClanahan publicly read her poignant essay "Dependent," about the influence her father's Marine Corps service had on her childhood and on her choices made during early adulthood. Until then, I'd never considered that dependents held agency in the genre of military writing. And I knew of no other essays written by military family members. Fortunately, the hunch paid off. Sifting through the flood of submissions from veterans and family members, I kept gravitating toward the family-related essays, reasoning that my personal military experience produced an expected degree of familiarity with the service-related ones. But the heart-wrenching essays penned by spouses, children, and grandchildren—and in most cases never previously shared with anyone—read often like pleas or, dare I say, prayers for forgiveness about what they'd not said, asked, or appreciated regarding their loved one's military service experience. The flames of anger, bitterness, and resentment had been snuffed to barely glowing embers, [End Page 58] thanks to years-long journeys of internal and external exploration across unmapped geography. In the end, thirty-two essays, divided nearly equally between veterans and family members, found their way into Red, White, and True. But … of this I'm certain, looking back—had McClanahan's "Dependent" been a poem rather than an essay, Red, White, and True would have surely included poetry. Such is the history that influenced my reading of Pamela Hart's Mothers Over Nangarhar, winner of the 2017 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. In this debut poetry collection, Hart, an artist by training, weaves together literary, political, musical, metaphysical, and geographical references as a way to explore her wandering, maze-like journey as the mother of a son deployed to Afghanistan. For Hart, the process involves "writing backward to figure out forward." Throughout, one cannot escape the undertones of longing for news, of the weight from dread and worry that surely every parent endures when a child has been sent to a war zone. For constructs, Hart employs meditations, photography, news articles, support group meetings, family interviews, and letters. During the collection's first of five parts, she often relies on geographic references in the meditative prose poem "Cities & Signs & War," in which she reveals a relatable yearning to reconcile her son's new environment with her personal surrender: If all cities are Venice and all Venice is memory then where will you be deployed. Will you see Venice in Kabul. … Your M4 over your shoulder. Marco Polo tells Khan the streets are written pages; the city says everything. … The signs are signs of other things. What do I as your mother know of this. Nothing. In another prose poem, "River of Painted Rocks," the inciting incident also intersects memory with place—"Along the Chattahoochee we walk"—and compares her son there as "You were a blond baby" to his now being a soldier. "We don't visit Carson McCuller's home," she writes. "She married a soldier from Fort Benning." In perhaps one of the collection's most compelling poems, "War Games," Hart recalls, "My son's...