Imagined Sons

How did you let him go?

With black ink and legalese

How did you let him go?

It’d be another year before I could vote [.]

The first lines of Imagined Sons’ opening poem “A Birthmother’s Catechism” make an uncompromising, direct introduction to Etter’s most recent collection, which explores nearly two decades of pain and also possibilities experienced by a woman who had given up her son for adoption. The collection evolves from this searing memory of the post-birth and handover time through a series of prose poems imagining potential encounters with her now-grown son, interspersed with incantatory, self-examining “catechisms”.

The use of the plural in the title is apt. What does she know of her infant son now? There are legions of grown sons populating her mind. Is he the accusatory son on her doorstep, delivering the shopping, or her lookalike street corner Goth with his “flashing glare”? In one of the dream poems, does he appear in the guise of her former classmate, calling “Whore, whore, whore”? In her constant subliminal search there are fears. Perhaps he’s the mistaken encounter with the Big Issue vendor? Or the boy with the knowing, possessive adoptive mother? He may also no longer be the gender she had believed at birth. Etter explores challenges. She explores nightmares. He might be a convict. He might even be her rapist.

These are dense prose poems questioning, and of unanswered and desperate imagining. Anyone who has doubts about the status of the prose poem as a poetic form would do well to read the often short, image-strong yet lyrical lines which deliver a powerful punch. They form a mental journal, but stop pleasingly short of an unfettered stream of consciousness. There is a strong sense of an omnipresent and insistent pain, backtracking the narrator’s every move. Highly imagistic and rhythmic, even within the prose shape, Etter’s considered line endings and sometimes, and perhaps surprisingly, tense enjambment work hard.

If these prose poems are dense, they are given breath by a series of “Birthmother’s Catechisms”, a form physically open on the page but weighted with the religious provenance of the word. Here is the self-imposed confessional, the hunger for explanation and an unreachable self-forgiveness. The chafe of sackcloth and the smell of ash are close. With a brutal, blunt simplicity in repeated questioning, her answers are harrowingly terse –

 

Who do you think you are?

A wrong answer

Who do you think you are?

An aptitude for words his parents do not share

Who do you think you are?

The vestige of an unacknowledged longing

Who do you think you are?

Eve

Who do you think you are?

No one, no one at all [.]

If that line leaves us with an Emily Dickenson image, many of the closing lines in these catechisms are beautiful too in their imagist scope –

Houndstooth daisies, in a small, extended fist [.]

Significantly, not one of the responses in the Catechisms finishes with a full stop. Closure never comes.

Few readers will know this particular pain in Imagined Sons but there are markers of loss which anchor her words in the consciousness of all but the youngest reader. There is shared understanding most particularly of premature loss in her examination of anticipated anniversaries, when “the melancholy arrives before the remembering”. There is wider resonance felt in the unintended hurt inflicted by the stranger on the train’s casual remarks, and the emptiness of that “holiday of loss” on Mother’s Day. Similarly, there will be empathy when the anniversary of private trauma coincides with a very public tragedy (in this case 9/11), with unleashed and leashed emotional consequences.

This collection is shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award. Much has been muttered as to whether this is autobiographical or not. That seems a prurient curiousity. The questions we need to ask are – is this good poetry which truly examines a significant aspect of the human condition? Does it extend our understanding? Undoubtedly the answers to those questions are yes. Imagined Sons is an important and beautiful collection.

Beth McDonough