HOW THE EARTH HOLDS US
In poems reminiscent of Mary Oliver’s work, the author recounts her mother’s suicide when Tuteur was 17 and its repercussions. She compares two of her own identities, as an adoptee and a Jew, concluding they are alike in that “both chosen / and dispossessed, we can’t stop / calling out for the impossible homeland” (“On Not Being a Jew”). In “Negative Space,” the poet details the struggle to connect with her birth mother, “the void just over my shoulder” who refused her request to meet. “I was the gap in her universe. / She wasn’t going to turn around,” the poet laments; of her birth mother’s funeral, she writes, “I hear the silence behind the silence / where the echo of her absence does not ring.” Other poems effectively take an unapologetic tone, as in “Adultery in Late Middle Age,” which circles around her lover’s second wife being “deceived by our low-key friendliness”; she later lingers over the way love changes as lovers age, likening them to tired elephants, “walking, two by two, / down dusty roads toward sunset” (“A Ripening”). The poet similarly considers the passage of time in “Aging,” how the past loses its momentousness as death inches closer: “All you have is the present you breathe in.” There is a clear sense of joy resounding through these poems in lines such as “I am living in the echo / of a clear bell’s ring” (“Grace for My Twenty-Fifth Year”), and there is also an undertone of sorrow, often against a backdrop of beauty: “roses, wisteria assault us / with the stubborn persistence of life.” Her descriptions are also surprising and lively, as when describing the way the moon “went on down as eager as a child on a slide” (“Invocation”) or a flock of birds becomes “A swarm of heartbeats” (“Birds Bearing South”).
