JERI THERIAULT, Self-Portrait as Homestead. Cumberland, ME: Deerbrook Editions, 2023. ISBN: 9798986505244

reviewed by Brad Richard

As the past recedes in the distance of years, two very different things can happen: we may preserve it in memory as a place always waiting for us to return, just as we were, or it can become a place we can hardly imagine, where we cannot recognize ourselves, where we have become strangers. Crucially, it is also the one place we must imagine if we are to know who we are. For poets, who attend closely to the particulars of now, conveying the past may present some conundrums: If we render it as unchanging, are we being true to it—and to ourselves? If we have changed, doesn’t that change our perception of the past, its reality and its truth? And if, in our poems, we want to make then as present as now, can we inhabit and be true to both at the same time? Such work is not nostalgia—which, when first coined, described a pathological homesickness, “a morbid longing to return to one’s home or native country,”1 a static and stagnant country. No, the goal of this work is salutary and dynamic, clarifying the self’s understanding of how it was formed. 

Jeri Theriault’s rich and thoughtful new collection, Self-Portrait as Homestead, does this work with extraordinary imagination, craft, and precision. The voice of these poems (mostly that of the same first-person speaker, with a few persona poems and some, including the title poem, in second person), is both reserved and intimate, never drawing attention to itself but rather to the poem’s concerns. I feel a lot of respect in this voice, for its subjects, the reader, and the self who speaks. 

The opening poem, “Ode to My Father’s Body,” pulls us in with a remarkable metaphor that develops almost matter-of-factly over the course of an equally remarkable sentence:  

I lose my way in the low-note harmonica

of my father’s absence & unfold the map

of his body in the big window of his barbershop

at the corner of Summer 

& Gold    where he    slow   stood all-day

poised to conduct the chorale    clip-clip

of his trade    shears    razor    hot-towel

talc    brush & tonic    Red Sox radio

my father tidy & distant    not

dissonant. 

This passage exemplifies the calm clarity with which these poems guide us from line to line, image to image, and deeper into apt figuration. “[T]he low-note harmonica / of my father’s absence” evokes a sound the speaker associates with her father but which now is a signifier of his absence. For the speaker, that sound is also a place where she is lost, leading her to “unfold the map / of his body” in order to find the way to her father in the past, plying his trade in a milieu where he displayed the easy authority of expertise, “conduct[ing] the chorale . . . of his trade.” The father’s actions and the lovingly catalogued details of the barber shop, emblems of a known but mysterious adult world, convey a child’s perspective without the poem having to declare it. By the end of the sentence, the father is “tidy & distant”: the speaker knows she is looking at the past; her father is, in fact, absent; remembering him does not truly bring him back. He is also, however, “not // dissonant,” which returns us to that “low-note harmonica” and suggests to me, among other things, that both in his barbershop and in the speaker’s memory, he belongs. That being true, having found what she was looking for, the speaker is no longer lost. This is remarkable work, almost analytical in its precision, yet intensely lyrical in its execution, and Theriault makes it all look easy.

Speaking of lyrical qualities, here’s a sample of the dense, idiosyncratic, and affecting music of these poems:

her vision    a post-war    pin-up version

of pretty    lip-held like pebble or penny.

[from “Self-Portrait in the Bathroom Mirror”]

Dim wattage. 

Weight your bones

with should & ought. 

                                                            Wait. 

[from “Charm for a Perfect Daughter”]

 “Communion” contains this striking evocation of smoking: 

                                                      about to ignite

her need for the world

by pulling it hard inside her

The discursive directness of the opening line of “The Sound of Water” belies its power: “You have one day to dismantle what your mother left behind.” That line sets the poem’s timer, an urgency made more painful by the word “dismantle.” How can we not imagine that among the things the mother left behind, and which the “you” must also dismantle, is the “you” herself? 

After grounding us in the opening poem about the speaker’s father, the book quickly begins connecting personal experiences with larger concerns. “My Father on Iowa Jima” delves into what the speaker does not and cannot know about her father’s or any soldier’s experience of war, leading her to “invent a father with more / to say. How exactly that gun felt. Where it hurt.” “More Troops Sent to the Middle East Amid Fears of Unrest” interrogates its affectless headline-title by delving into etymologies that unsettle our sense of peaceful domestic life being tidily separate and safe from foreign unrest: 

while bells clang out 

their hearts

or is it their tongues

                                    telling war or peace

                                                with iron ferrum

                                                            ferocious    fierce    feral

                                    as in ploughshares from ferrum

                                    also known as gladii

                                    or swords

                                                & this year

                                    our gladiolas raised spikey petals

                                    the way beauty often leads

                                    to sharpness

Such moves add complexity and surprise to the book’s project of creating a self-portrait. The book’s title led me to expect poems evoking self through place, as they do to some extent. But there is no homestead here, in the sense of a piece of land a family inhabits and works over generations. The poem “Homestead” acknowledges the “lilacs and saltmarsh” of the region where the speaker’s family settles, but its focus is the grueling work of people concerned with just getting by—“everything earned / with the work of dangerous / breathing”—which could be true in many places: “Somewhere factories unmake (still) / lungs / backs / hands” of people who are, as the speaker’s forebears were, “glad for good sweat and strain.”  

The homestead of the title poem lies in the idea of the self-portrait itself, connecting it to the conceit of body as place, and especially as house, that runs throughout the book. “You take a good look    something / you’ve been avoiding all these years / your skin a kind of peach stucco / the hallway blurred // with clutter.” After noting grim totems of the past, the speaker remembers:

                                    You wanted a light-filled house

                                    with wood floors and unexpected 

                                    rooms. A possible place     the way

                                    womb hums the sound of home. 

The speaker may not have gotten that "light-filled house.” But we are very fortunate that Jeri Theriault has crafted a homestead for herself in these luminous poems.  

Notes:

(1) Johannes Hofer,  from his 1688 medical dissertation, cited in, among other sources, “Hypochondria of the Heart,” by Craig Lambert, Harvard Magazine, Sept.-Oct. 2001, https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2001/09/hypochondria-of-the-hear-html