Poems For, By, and
About Mothers
 

Mother songs—the music of her heart and blood—drumbeat and sliding rhythm—are the first things we hear. Enciente, her voice—coming to us as if from heaven, or at least some other sphere—informs the scale of our molding-melody, our own private song that we sing to ourselves throughout our life, our crooning explanation of what it's all about, what we remember knowing from the beginning of a duet with her that haunts us even when she's gone. This anthology of poems for, by and about mothers is a lullaby, a chant, a blessing song, and a curse—all the things a mother's voice can be, and evoke, and more. All sans greeting card mawkishness.

MotherSongs is a collection of predominantly modern works but also includes: medieval ballads, courtly lyrics, 'Romantic musings' and 'Victorian meditations'. The book is divided up into twelve sections (had I been editing I would have tried to keep it to nine sections—a nice conceit for the nine months of pregnancy) and covers everything from conceiving the child, in part one, With Child: The Mother-To-Be, to myths of maternity and conceiving of the mother in the final chapters. In between the book deals with everything from heredity and origins, My Grandmothers Were Strong: Exploring Origins, to the aging process and death of our primeval icon of mortality—the face we see as if through prognosticator's glass  —our mothers and our mothers/our selves. 

There are maternal expectations as conundrums and wonder.

Sylvia Plath, in You're:

Vague as fog and looked for like mail.
Farther off than Australia.
Bent-backed Atlas, our traveled prawn...
A clean slate, with your own face on.

Ann Winters, in The Stethoscope:

Like Halley's comet, bending on its tail,
you curl beneath the black cup on my skin:
I guess at limbs in half-eclipse, obscure
and fluent as a distant telegraph.

Wry musings:

Linda Pastin, on giving birth, in Notes from the Delivery Room:

Babies should grow in fields;
common as beets or turnips

Ruth Stone in I Have Three Daughters, suspects her daughters are:

Singing, sprinkle snow down on Mama's hair
And lordy, give us our share.

Judith Ortiz Coffer, in Claims:

Children are made in the night and
steal your days
for the rest of your life, amen

Pure and simple devotionals sit page by page with vituperative rantings. Breath-catching snatches of mother's grief well up alongside a daughter's inevitable loss.

The editorial notes introducing each section make for great reading too. They examine the theme of each aspect of motherhood explored; discourse on such various points of interest as the sanctification of motherhood, infertility and the politics of parenthood.

One of my favorites from this collection, among many favorites, is Sharon Olds' Why My Mother Made Me:

Maybe I am what she always wanted
my father as a woman,
maybe I am what she wanted to be
when she first saw him, tall and smart,
standing there in the college yard with the
hard male light of 1937
shining on his black hair. She wanted that
power. She wanted that size. She pulled and
pulled through him as if he were dark
bourbon taffy, she pulled and pulled and
pulled through his body until she drew me out,
rubbery and gleaming, her life after her life.
Maybe I am the way I am
because she wanted exactly that,
wanted there to be a woman
a lot like her, but who would not hold back, so she
pressed herself hard against him,
pressed and pressed the clear soft
ball of herself like a stick of beaten cream
against his stained sour steel grater
until I came out the other side of his body,
a big woman, stained, sour, sharp,
but with the milk at the center of my nature.
I lie here now as I once lay
in the crook of her arm, her creature,
and I feel her looking down into me the way the
maker of a sword gazes at his face in the
steel of the blade.

Did you plan on buying your mother flowers this month? Instead of flowers (OK, really in "addition" to flowers!) give her this book. Inscribe it with your own poetry, a dedication to her. Even if your mother can't imagine where you get your duende from, swears she does not "get" poetry or understand its depths—write her a poem. And even if you don't write poetry—write just this one. It will be a bouquet of words, a handmade thing, fingerprints—of your individualism—still smudged on surface where she can touch you, her fingertip to whorls within whorls. Or, let the poems in this book speak for you—Aaron to your Moses before, not a Pharoah, but a Nefertiti.

See how the songs in MotherSongs will reach any mother's aorta cochlea—the ear in the heart, shell inlaid chamber, mother of pearl. Grab this book while it is still in bookstores—on the heels of April being Poetry Month and on the cusp of May's Mother's Day. Or, order it through Norton's website.

Additional recommended reading: The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration by Edward Hirsch, Woman: An Intimate Journey by Natalie Angier, The Myths of Motherhood by Sherri L. Thurer