Long Reach Home

Lynn R. Szabo is a chair of the English Department at Trinity Western
University, Langley, B.C.

This finely designed volume of narrative verse consists of seven
sections of recorded and remembered experience constructed from the
author’s domestic and social realms. Each section is introduced by a
sepia-like drawing of the house and garden with the white picket fence,
which perhaps provides the metaphor of the longings, dreams, and lost
hopes of the narrator. The collection is book-ended by the narrator’s
childhood and her coming to terms with nearly 25 years of marriage and
motherhood, with many of the common motifs of womanly encounters set
against the backdrop of her gardener’s wisdom and Maritime stoicism
about life.

The thematic values of the collection center on family
interconnectivity with its intimacies and distances, as well as
male/female relationships with their attendant joys and grief. In a
poignant statement of closure, the narrator recognizes the path of her
poetry: “My slow-motion house sinks / into its sandstone foundation /
one memory at a time.” At times, the verses show an unusual visual
acuity that is perhaps prompted by her mother’s blindness. Otherwise,
the force of the language is often robbed by the need for closure and
analysis, rather than the sculpting of metaphor that demands
interpretations and response instead of observation and assent.

The narrator’s voice often remains outside the experiences of its
subjects, keeping the reader aloof from their drama and power in spite
of the finely nuanced and delicately sensitive emotional range of the
record they provide. Yet the language often offers beautifully
embellished description and moving epigrams from the narrator, who
endured childhood polio with quiet bravery and its traumatic medical
necessities: “I am afraid this night / before surgery, / still hugging
the stuffed fawn / Mom has left. … I grin, forget my fear / of freshly
fused bone.” Such invitations into her private experience leave the
reader ambivalently curious about the narrator’s process and
perspective.

The best poem in the volume is “Power Failure.” Its excellent and
incisive metaphor renders the narrator in graphic and profound voicing:
“I am charged / with the current / of anyone’s pain … [p]owerless
to shut down, my circuits blow.” With all that is recorded in Long
Reach Home, one recognizes the deep humanity and defining limitations of
a narrator who respects the value of language to locate it.