Sarah Alcott Anderson, We Hold On To What We Can.

 

Sarah Alcott Anderson, We Hold On To What We Can. Loom Press, 2021. 119pp. $20.00

Review by Ruth Hoberman


Sarah Alcott Anderson’s debut collection, We Hold On To What We Can, returns again and again to the message of its title. Children grow up, family and old friends die, the places we love change. What can we retain from the passage of time? Anderson is the daughter of a photographer, and the poems are charged with some of the emotional aura of a family album: moments caught—vivid, but trailing clouds of loss.

Anderson, who has an MFA from Warren Wilson College, chairs the English department at Berwick Academy, in Maine. She and her husband live in New Hampshire with their two children, where they run the Word Barn, which hosts readings and workshops. Her poems have appeared in various journals, including North American Review and Raleigh Review.

The challenge of writing about the passage of time, of course, is figuring out how to avoid sentimentality. Anderson does this by using precise language and (mainly) short lines; the poems feel restrained, understated, even reticent. Transitions and context are minimal; moments and images are juxtaposed without elaboration. “Let parts of your world/speak to each other,” the speaker says in “Come Here,” quoting advice an artist once gave her. Or, as she says in “Sweet Gum Seed Pods,” “We hold on to what we can./My son’s hair is thick, golden,/a wilderness.”

The poems are grouped into four sections. The first focuses on childhood; the second losses (great uncle, friend, grandfather, older brother); the third more recent relationships; and finally “Kaleidoscope” addresses the mind-bending complexity of time. But themes and images recur throughout: in particular, as a poem from the first section, “Beginnings & Tornadoes,” has it, “It’s about Time”:

It’s always about time. Strings of little lights

and paper lanterns, the shimmering city over there,




the sirens over there. All those lives

in all those windows.

The poem mourns the long absence of a childhood friend: “Why/did it take us this long? My children have filled me./They have filled me. I should have called you.” The repetition suggests the way children both satisfy and consume. Now, at last, they talk and remember: “girls racing headlong toward the magic/and the hurt. No one could have stopped us./We had salt in our hair and we were fast.”

Other poems make similar efforts to recreate past moments or bridge distances between people. “Let me put you there,” “MacMahan Island” opens, inviting the reader into the speaker’s past, in this case a church service in Maine when the speaker and her twin sister are five. But we never quite get there. The moment hasn’t just slipped away; it was illusory to begin with, infused with a future that will undo it. “In two years, our parents/will separate. All that is, seen and unseen.” This snippet from the Nicene Creed appears as part of the church service, but also as a reminder that, much as her minister father might insist on the reality of the “world to come,” any single moment is inseparable from the ones preceding and coming after them. The speaker and her sister pretend they are lost:

I had heard about lost explorers—shipwrecks.

Where were our parents

those afternoons? Just behind or ahead of us,

I am sure. We are always turning,

responding to someone calling a name.

The sisters feel secure enough to want to pretend they’re lost; someone will always call a name. But in a sense they really are lost—caught up, as we all are, in fantasies and a future we can’t foresee.

To compensate for these uncertainties and losses, the poems celebrate love—not romantic love so much as a relatedness manifest through gesture. In “Turning to Go,” for example, the speaker stands behind her naked three-year-old son as he climbs a rock:

I stand behind him,

my arms ready. I imagine

holding my arms this way

for the rest of my life,

as if the space

I create with my limbs

will endure

his turning to go . . .

This idea that the mother’s gesture might create something enduring—combining memory and love in a single, embodied manifestation—strikes me as strangely powerful.

Such a gesture turns up in other poems as well. In “Turn, It’s Been Three Decades,” the speaker remembers drawing on her children’s backs: “If I could have traced my finger gently in circles/along your skin forever, girls, if I could have,” she says longingly. In “Moonstone,” the speaker opens, “If I could, I’d press my thumb along you/like I do across this smooth moon necklace…” And “Come Here” ends:

This drive has become




everything I can’t say

to you. In slow, half-moon

strokes, I will




wipe your face

with a warm cloth.

This is all I can promise.

The gesture compensates for what can’t be expressed or reconstituted.

What “drive” is the speaker referring to? The book is framed as a journey by the poems that open and close it. The first poem, “Caution,” warns “Do not run/on this trail.” And the last, a prose poem, “Free Advice,” is set on a highway: don’t mistake the taillights you see for the windows of a hostel, the poem warns us. We may be invited into the poems as co-constructors of past moments, but we’ll never quite arrive anywhere. “Maybe I’ll meet you in the dark,” “Free Advice” concludes, evoking Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass ends, “I stop somewhere waiting for you.” But Anderson isn’t as sure as Whitman about the meetup: “Maybe I’ll meet you in the dark, but you have to keep walking for now. Think of the gestures we all misread, slough them off, step over them. Keep going.” We will never get the whole picture—of the past or of each other—but perhaps the gestures of affection offered by these poems suffice.