Poppies for Our Sisters

Mary Ellen Miller was a poet and Associate Professor of English at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green.

These are poems told in the many voices of immigrant women (Vietnamese, Italian, Chinese, Ugandan, Ukrainian, Estonian, Czechoslovakian, German, Japanese-Canadian). Though not otherwise stipulated, Massel’s long list of acknowledgements indicates that she interviewed women of these nationalities and that her poems are based on their actual experiences: nearby always experiences of horror — the horrors of war, of hunger, of death, of being uprooted and isolated. There are few pretty moments in these narrative poems, yet most of them reflect the heroism of women surviving against horrendous odds. The title is an appropriate encomium for all our sisters who understand the words of the poem about Kazuko, “Shikato Ga Nai” (if you must, you must). These women (many of them mothers of young children) do what must be done.

With few exceptions, the poems are longer than most contemporary poems. They rely heavily for their effect on cumulative power. That power is sustained by Massel’s device of mixing narrative voice with first-person speaker. This device intensifies the dramatic impact and helps the poems to move quickly. “She Saved a Desk for Me,” one of the shortest poems, lacks this dramatic intensity, as does “The Eyes of the Future,” a poem that ends without an ending.

There are some examples of silliness and sentimentality; places where the reader wants to say, “So? What is the point?”; places where the poet seems to be telling something for no better reason than that she knows it. But overall these are read-worthy, and the nice sustained cadence of the poems cries out for dramatic interpretation.