CHRISTINE GELINEAU, Almanac: A murmuration, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2025. ISBN: 9798855801798

Reviewed by Jeri Thériault

Both memoir and essay collection, Christine Gelineau’s Almanac: a murmuration, offers a tapestry of thought and memory, observation and admonition. A prize-winning poet and a life-long horsewoman who raises Morgans with her husband in Windsor, New York, Gelineau chose the almanac form to allow “both formal shaping and intuitive leaps simultaneously”(59).  Like The Farmers’ Almanac, Gelineau’s memoir is organized according to the calendar and includes “a miscellany of information.”1 This form allows for such wide-ranging topics as descriptions of nature, discussions on the difficulty of truth in narrative, climate change, and details about living with and caring for horses.  “Murmuration” conjures the waves of starlings filling a sky, as the book’s cover shows, but also suggests the unexpected flows and turns of her own thought process.  

Named after the months of the year, each of the chapters engages with multiple subjects. “January” begins with a small section on the “shattering cold” (1) and the supermoon, then moves to a section on horses in their winter stalls. The next section begins, “My mother didn’t take any crap” (1),  and moves on from there to childhood memories and information about her mother’s ancestry. As one who lives close to the land, Gelineau is attuned to nature. In the February chapter, she writes  “we wake to a world furred with snow. The trees have turned to lungs” (15). She says of August, “the last straggler lilies flare the flutes of their blossoms, resplendent among the emptied stalks where July’s full flush had blazed. Already the autumn goldenrod is budded, ready” (79). Her garden is “calendar, history, songline, an intricate connection” (117).  

A significant theme of this book is the challenge of telling the whole truth in narratives. Gelineau maintains that we live by stories “that give shape and meaning to our lives as individuals, and to the larger context of our individual lives, stories we label ‘history’ and ‘national identity’” (21). Though truth-telling “is the most impossible of language’s uses to achieve,” she believes that the attempt “to do so anyway, is language’s principal nobility.” In a passage about America’s foundational myth of the grateful pilgrims and generous natives at the first Thanksgiving, Gelineau reminds us that the natives had been decimated by European diseases even before the Mayflower’s arrival. The Wampanoag and other indigenous groups along the coast from Maine to Cape Cod called this event “The Great Dying” (21), while William Bradford, in On Plimouth Plantation, referred to the epidemic as “the good hand of God” (27), who wiped out the natives to give the land to the Pilgrims. 

Gelineau says that we also get caught up in this struggle to tell the truth when we talk about climate change, writing that there has been a “millennium of damage done by our presumption that we humans have been granted dominion over all the earth” (99).  Most of this action has been seemingly innocuous, undertaken with the aim to improve. One example is the multiflora rose planted in Gelineau’s valley in the 1950s as fast-growing hedges to mark boundaries. By now, the non-native plant has taken over vast tracts of land to the detriment of native flora. As she describes her war on Rosa multiflora—with hoe and muscle and backhoe—she wonders if there’s a way “for us to feel the web that is our true home, and aim to replenish rather than to consume, to contribute rather than to claim” (99).

Gelineau also discusses truth in narrative as it applies to her own life. The big secret of her childhood is her mother’s alcoholism, a topic never acknowledged by her parents and never since discussed with family or friends. The family maintained a fiction that everything was okay, even though alcoholism touched all aspects of her childhood, becoming “the accelerant poured over everything” (37). Telling the truth now, Gelineau admits her fear that her mother’s story will be limited to “she was an alcoholic,” while, in fact, she was complicated and fierce, “polished, professional . . . and friendly . . . she was someone to be reckoned with” (16).

Discussions of truth aside, much of Almanac: a murmuration is a typical Northeastern story. Gelineau’s parents were the children of immigrants, her mother Irish-American and her father Franco-American. Their working-class roots produced a 1950s household with a stay-at-home mom and a struggling family business. Little Christine went to Saint Joseph School and sat in the back of the room near a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary. She was captivated by the lives of the saints and the rhetorical cadences of the Baltimore Catechism. Gelineau sums up her early love of nature in memories of summer day camp when she played “in the soft duff of the forest floor at the marshy edge of the brook that fed the camp pond, hunting frogs” (38). 

Attempting to explain why words and horses are the mainstays of her life, Gelineau remembers her father pulling the car to the side of the road so that she could see the horses grazing in the pasture. Another memory is of an Esso gas station’s “crimson Pegasus” (3) flashing through her bedroom window, what she remembers as “a reassuring pattern, the ascendant winged horse mounting the dark, horses and poetry flickering into my childhood dreams” (3). There’s a wonderful story of the six-year-old who happily consumed her entire first-grade reader the first day of school, the little girl who read under a tree when her mother sent her outside to play, the dreamy, bookish child who knew she wanted to be a writer “from the age of nine” (39). 

Given her lifelong love of horses, it’s not surprising that Gelineau’s prose is at its most transcendent when she writes about them. The description of “foal watch” in the April chapter is mesmerizing. Apparently, a mare’s owner usually stands ready to assist in the birth process. Gelineau identifies with the birthing mother: “At no other time do you live more … embodied than in those nine months of pregnancy … yet never are you less in control” (43). During the birth of the foal, the mare pushes “the foal’s shoulders over the lip of her own pelvis. Shoulders past, the foal swishes to the rib cage in a small wash of fluids” (43). The reader is pulled into this narrative which gives such insight into the nature of horses: 

A strong foal will already be batting about in its iridescent sac, tearing 

the caul, shaking free into air and light … The foal shakes, sneezes fluid, 

whinnies. Answering whinnies sound all up and down the barn aisle—

high-pitched, curious—but it is the dam’s deep tremolo to which 

the foal responds. (43)

Gelineau’s passages about horses insist on physical truth as a way of confronting the challenges of narrative. She describes “horseback riding as a proverbial, interspecies ‘language’ that is spoken with the whole of the body, a kinetic poetry that the ‘poet’ and the ‘poem’ create together” (86). She writes that “Riding can provide very much the same kind of mysterious interlocking with an ‘other’ that the poet feels with the material of poetry when inspiration is flowing” (86). This symbiosis of horse and rider, between poet and poem, is perhaps the perfect metaphor for the startling murmurations of Gelineau’s lyrical memoir.

Notes

1. Miriam-Webster Unabridged, 2026. Accessed Sept. 10, 2026. https://unabridged.merriam-webster.com/unabridged/almanac.