QUIET...

Churchill’s posthumous poetry collection offers memories and observations of a life cut short.

Although the late author wrote the poems in this book between her diagnosis in November 2010 and her death just even months later, their subject matter spans decades of her life. Reflecting on her youth in “Phyllip, the boy next door,” she muses, “We used to have such dreamy dreams.” “Our Lady of Angels” hints at her being a victim of bullying in a parochial school. She recalls moving from Chicago to Berkeley, California, as an adult, where “everything was a first.” “Augenblinck” consists of snapshots of major milestones: menarche, marriage, remarriage, and death. Aging ushers in health struggles, and in her 50s, she underwent a mastectomy: “I traded my left breast for life” (“Barn Swallows”). In the wake of her ALS diagnosis, she admits to having “fallen in love with my bed” (“Not long for the world”). She recounts her father’s hospitalization after a garage-door accident in “My Father,” which left him “a stranger in a hospital bed / pie-faced, shaved, cologned.” However, the gloriousness of nature is also a strong throughline in Churchill’s work. When a tree in a neighboring yard comes down, she observes in “Respiration” that “a hundred thousand / listening leaves / give off the last / of their life-giving oxygen.” These poems are alive with sensory details, such as “the wet slap / of gasping sunfish and bluegills / on the floor of the old Chevrolet” (“How Like a Serpent”). Occasionally, she falls into passive constructions in lines such as “cricket is captured in a stone lantern / carried carelessly by an old man” (“Dreams”), which weakens the poems’ impact, overall. Also, the inclusion of slurs such as “Chinaman” and “Jewgirl,” while reflective of the way bigots used to talk, don’t effectively add to a feeling of authenticity. Editor Butterworth, the poet’s spouse, offers a notes section and a brief biography thatmight have been improved by a stronger edit.

An elegant and evocative compilation by a contemplative poet.