Sam Szanto’s chapbook This Was Your Mother is a breath of life, a work of art wrought by a person alone in a room with language. In the canon of contemporary works it takes its place along side Christine Tabaka’s For Love of You from the U.SA., and Lindsay Soberano Wilson’s Hoods of Motherhood from Canada. Szanto writes from where she lives, in the U.K. Tabaka’s poems center around being a daughter, Soberano Wilson’s around being a mother, and Szanto’s around being a spouse and a mother, part of a family. Considering threads of commonality, three tones Szanto evokes are anticipation, elation, and reflection.
The anticipation of birth, a new life entering the world is felt in parts 2 and 3 of the epistolary ‘Letters to R.’ Throughout these poems Szanto brings the past to present. In 2, a mother tells her child, ‘At ten weeks I bled’ and ‘The bleeding continued/ off and on.’ While her anticipation is joyful, there is also anxiety. ‘For the first time since my wedding day/ I went inside a church, lit a candle/ and prayed for your life.’ She is not alone.
The Jasmine Unit was apart
from the hospital’s main midwifery building
and hard to find.
We sat for a long time in a yellow-painted room
full of people who looked as scared as we did.
A midwife put cold gel on my stomach and pressed hard
with the scanner, searching
for your heartbeat.
It came.
What I was hoping for, what we were hoping for happened, she suggests in this second epistle. We were all right. In 3 she says ‘Labour went on and on/ and your heartbeat dipped/ and I bit your dad’s hand.’ Part 1 begins ‘Suddenly I knew you were there.’ There’s a strong sense of lineage. In another poem that anticipates new life, Szanto comments on her expectant parents. ‘I picture him pacing the corridors/ in his odd socks and old corduroy jacket,/ scared and bored/ as my mother sucked in gas and air/ and her body performed an everyday miracle.’
The baby is born, the baby comes home from the hospital. There’s a lot of intense joy, elation. Elation is evident in the second strophe of ‘When I dream of my Grandmother She is Not.’ It is seen, heard, and felt in ‘Singing at Bedtime’ and ‘My Son Falls in Love with a Potato’ and subtle in ‘My Mother, the Protestor.’ A counter to the war machine’s bringing destruction and death is the mother’s bringing life into the world. Just as Rilke evokes the mother in poems protesting war, Szanto evokes her mother in this poem, doing her part to stop the tanks and guns and their wake of destruction. The elation is embodied in humanity, as the poet-daughter wonders
Did she join in with the mass
ululations? Was she dragged out of her tent
in the dead of night by soldiers?
It’s easier to imagine her chatting
with them through the fence
about their wives and daughters.
That her mother is not so much reacting against war, but acting for peace is cause for celebration. Celebrate the life of one who gives life, not takes it.
Considering the chapbook’s title, This Was Your Mother, readers, along with the speaker, reflect. The poet looks back in ‘History,’ ‘The Rabbit,’ and ‘The Mouse.’ Her present tense verbs vivify her refections. The mood, the tone of reflection pervades in the chapbook’s first poem and in its last. ‘Hiraeth’ begins ‘There is another place/ in which she exists/ the girl I did not give birth to/ fourteen years ago,’ and concludes ‘in February she is in my heart’s cold chambers/ her home is me/ her home was me.’ What comes in between is intensely reflective. Just as there is a speculative daughter in ‘Hireath’ there is another woman, perhaps a speculative mother, or even a woman her son will marry in ‘My Son’s Life Story Book.’
The woman squeezes past me in the hall
where he battled to crawl, my brain rattling
with the little stories I cling on to
now he is gone. She wants to take photos
of pertinent things. Take one of me, please,
I want to plead, but show her his bedroom,
an unfilled space where his cot used to be.
There’s a sense of loss, absence, a sense of time moving forward, and a sense of looking back. Photos capture the past, so do words.
These poems are deeply personal, and intricate. About mothers, fathers, children, in their humanity they include others. That each merits being read time and again is due to Sam Szanto’s skills with language, her knowing what to put in, what to leave out, her precise imagery, and lyrical phrasing. The sense is in the sound, and in her depiction of things and people.
This Was Your Mother is very good. It embodies the best in contemporary poetry.
Peter Mladinic 6th April 2024
Tears in the Fence 