On “Cairn” Peggy Shumaker’s Deceptively Simple Poems Will Stay with You Forever

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Peggy Shumaker was the Alaska State Writer Laureate for 2010-2012 and the founding editor of Boreal Books, publishers of fine art and literature from Alaska. Cairn, her recently published collection, evokes life in Alaska but frequently U-turns to the Tucson, Arizona of her childhood, making the 400 pages of Cairn a rich and diverse reading experience.

Largely made up of poems taken from her seven previous collections, the book also contains three sections of unexpected material. “Sparks,” which records an artistic conversation between Shumaker and her friend the painter Kes, is an almost novelistic account of each artist responding to each other’s work and providing prose feedback on each stage of the exchange. Woven into the artistic responses are the revelation of a cancer diagnosis and the death of a mutual close friend. Although the poems in this section are not Shumaker’s most memorable or accomplished, it provides an absorbing and novel testament to the vibrancy of the Alaska artistic community.

“Impossible Grace” is a deeply moving section of poems written around the death of Shumaker’s close friend and fellow poet Eva Saulitis. A “cairn” is a heap of stones used as a memorial for the dead and with each poem Shumaker builds a word-cairn for her friend. The poems are linguistically simple but emotionally complex and taken together evoke the universal suffering of an expected and painful death. Below is an extract from “Holy, the soup”:

Holy, the soup
each neighbour brings by.
By now, suffering has eased

Into our lives, moved in,
taken over. Overnight
we stop expecting next year,

next week, tomorrow.
Tomorrow might as well
be orbiting Saturn,

It’s that far out of reach. Reach
for her gently.

The subtle repetition of the final word of sentence to start the following sentence is a tool the poet employs frequently in the collection, evoking a sense of connection and continuity which feeds into her uneven but often exquisite pictures of nature throughout the poems selected from previous collections.

Death and nature appear to be Shumaker’s most glaring themes but there are two others bubbling under the surface which pack more of a punch than the more explicit subject matter. In the unforgettable opening poem “Parenthood, Unplanned” Shumaker writes in sharp two-line stanzas of her parent’s disastrous marriage after an unplanned teenage pregnancy and calls for the protection of reproductive right in America.

That broken teen
who carried me, who
pushed me out

into this world,
that brilliant

ragged girl
died young, worn down

In her thirties.
One small life,

I know. The only life
she had. I speak for her

When I say
Let women live.

Let women be.

The poet’s mother recurs as a painfully tragic character throughout this collection and Shumaker’s guilt over her parent’s unhappiness is palpable. The final section, an excerpt from her beautifully written lyrical memoir “Just Breathe Normally,” contains the simple line “All my fault, their misery.”

The poems “Hanna Zoe” and “The Provider,” about the poet’s mother and father respectively, are appropriately presented at the very centre of the collection as their lives and deaths reside at the centre of Shumaker’s art.

Such a vast collection is impossible to distill into a short review. In some poems the poet is heavily present, in others she is outside looking in. Many notable poems evoke nature such as “Sloth” and “Spirit of the Bat,” written in the rainforests of Costa Rica. The mysteries which lie inside the human heart are alluded to frequently, most notably in “The One Waiting”:

What she can’t
admit

crushes her, packs her
skull tight.

Scary, all
she knows.

Scary, all she
cannot know.

Cairn is a summary of a rich artistic life and evokes a fine and playful mind. Schumaker’s broad subject matter coupled with her skillfully expressed wisdom and deep human empathy makes this a collection which would make a fine addition to any personal library. Many of her deceptively simple poems will stay with me forever.

Buy Cairn (Red Hen Press, 2018) here.




Emma Gleeson Contributor
Emma Gleeson lives in Dublin. Her writing adventures include poems, cultural reviews, and essays. She has worked in the theatre industry as a costume designer and events coordinator, and lectures on sustainability. She has a BA in Drama & Theatre and an MA in Fashion History.

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