The Nature of Elegy

A review of Sarah Hannah's Inflorescence by Lorraine Wolters

Hannah, Sarah. Inflorescence. Dorset, Vermont: Tupelo Press, 2007. 88 pages, paper, $16.95.

As lived, grief is a wholly subjective sentiment, not easily harnessed or rigidly separated into labeled stages. When conveyed artistically, however, this emotion has the ability to transcend time and space. The elegy is a lamentation for the dead, thus allowing an uninvolved spectator to relate to the bereaved. Here, the writer’s challenge lies in her portrayal of the deceased: Through the provided lens, will the reader come to know the life remembered?

In this, her second book of poems, Sarah Hannah continues this elegiac tradition. Slightly guarded by a witty and sarcastic exterior, Hannah surrenders to her audience her own journey of great loss, vivid nostalgia and final release. The aptly named Inflorescence is a conduit, in verse, to compelling emotion and a sensory alliance with nature.

Writing about Inflorescence, John Deming pinpoints the element that differentiates other “versified accounts of cancer” from Hannah’s: it is her “insistence that her mother wants to die, and not because she is old or ill […she] has willed her own death, romanticized it as a means of enacting self-against-the-world pathos, and taken pleasure in the effect that it will have on her ex-husband and others.”

Divided into four sections, Inflorescence chronicles the mental deterioration and eventual death of Hannah’s mother, painter Renee Rothbein. The first section, “In Hospital,” establishes a sense of Rothbein’s sudden departure from her home (“The Garden As She Left It”) as well as her deep-seated malaise, evident in “Common Creeping Thyme (Serpillum a serpendo).” Amid grim realities, Hannah calmly records events, addressing her mother about her prognosis: “You’ve always wanted/ A brain tumor […].” It is a puzzling understatement; yet the poem as a whole is skillfully garnished with the lyrical run-down of “every herb you grow so expertly/ In pots behind your place.”

While a confrontation with morality begins this book, Inflorescence continues with its second section, “In The Old House,” as a remembrance of a life lived-for better or worse. Hannah fully confides in the reader, and even allows us to take her place for a few choice moments. “Read The House” is a prime example-Hannah presents a quiet, introspective and foreboding scene, creating a lasting sense of urgency with the singular and final line, “The house does not forgive you.”

This section is riddled with the red and blue imagery-more specifically that of fire and water-evoking the traditionally eastern (Hindu) perspective of the creation of new life in the wake of inevitable destruction. “At Last, Fire Seen As a Psychotic Break” illustrates this cyclical movement with a fire, beginning “in the crux and beam and insulation” and ending with the possibility of “quelling,” and the question: “If you stood nightly by the wall,/ Felt around for the heat,/ drawn a cold, wet cloth across the surface,/ And, speaking soft words,/ Held it?”

“In Home Hospice,” the collection's third section, introduces a deeper, more etiological portrait of Rothbein. Continuing her use of floral names and imagery as a lens, Hannah juxtaposes her mother’s early life with her last moments in hospice. Her use of the word Mum allows for these two points in time to converge: the poem titled “Inflorescence” creates a narrative of Hannah attempting to calm her mother as she desperately cries out for “Mum.” Hannah takes the reader into the past, as she asks her mother, “Can you see her, your rotund English mother […]/ or,/ My lady, do you call to me?” The British moniker for “Mom” overlays the image of a mum, a round vibrant flower, as Hannah continues to demonstrate her mother’s mental state (“Your fists/ Strike the sheets”), as well as the constant reminder of the pastime they both share (“All around us: flowers.”).

The final section of the book, “Inflorescence,” deals with an unfolding and subsequent flowering. Hannah’s mother died, and in doing so, she has entered another, greater realm of existence. The poems here are both haunting and perplexing-fitting sentiments, as Hannah inquires of her mother in “County of Last Residence:” “Are you living now in every whirring, worrying thing?/ […] Maybe you’re all the dead, and there are plenty,/ And all of them are you […].” Admittedly haunted by her mother, Hannah finds Rothbein’s presence inescapable in the overwhelming “current” of nature.

Inflorescence is a strong and well-paced collection of poems, the culmination of which is a profound and lyrical commentary on not just the intricate process of grieving a loss, but also how to live a life constantly surrounded by death. Hannah emits a sarcastic charm and unforgiving humor in her Author’s Notes, gripping the reader even after the collection ends; and for a moment, she springs to life, her somehow familiar voice resounding in each word. The parallel between nature and mortality begun early on sustains its grip on the reader’s conscienc. The one certainty we can gleam from Hannah’s Inflorescence is that life and death are simply and indelibly intertwined: “The dead are dead;/ Flowers are pretty.”