Mother in Summer (Triquarterly Books) [Paperback]

Susan Hahn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2002 | Series: Triquarterly Books

Mother in Summer is a collection of poems offering candid, powerful insight into the grief of losing a parent.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

The chronicle of a parent's death is nothing new to poetry but, if well handled, can offer new insights. Initially, this fifth collection by Hahn (following Holiday) has promise. While it begins with the all-too-innocent portrait of her mother seated in a lawn chair surrounded by flowers, in the book's second poem the lily has broken into fever: "No breeze or balm revives/ its once trumpet form." By the third poem, we see the mother at the start of cancer, again related in sensuous floral imagery: "Soon the full-blown flowered/ lump will appear in the crevice/ of your neck." In winter there's snow, ice, and fear for perennials. Hahn's insistence on equating her mother's rapidly failing health with the wondrous or cruel elements of nature is both the book's strength and its weakness. No single poem here carries the weight of Sylvia Plath's "Tulips." Hahn's flowers become easy similes, enabling the poet to skirt more painful emotions. Images repeat, clich s are scattered throughout, and the volume finally becomes monotonous. Recommended for larger collections. Rochelle Ratner, formerly with "Soho Weekly News," New York
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Hahn slashed and burned new ground in Holiday [BKL O 1 01] and now offers yet another dauntless collection, a tightly focused cycle of poems mourning the death of her mother. Hahn draws on classical tropes--the seasons as the cycle of an individual's life, flowers as chalices of light (so lovely and fleeting), trees as guardians, and grass, that persistently symbolic herbage, as mutable: it's "the fleshy grass" when her mother is young and "flame-haired"; "the metastasized grass" once cancer blooms--and revitalizes them by virtue of her needle-sharp use of language, vernacular, botanical, and medical. She savors the word gladioli, for instance, and then makes it seem possible that if one didn't know the dire meaning of carcinoma, it, too, might seem flowery. Hahn's attunement to topsy-turvy psychological states and her hyperawareness of the body's vulnerability charge her elegant poems with a stinging electricity, and her vision of disease as an ancient, reptilian force, and our perpetual helplessness before it, renders her grief timeless and quintessentially human. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 90 pages
• Publisher: Triquarterly; 1 edition (May 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0810151308
• ISBN-13: 978-0810151307
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,534,501 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars another triumph for Susan Hahn, April 27, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Mother in Summer (Triquarterly Books) (Paperback)

After reading Susan Hahn's remarkable book, Holiday, I thought I'd have to wait a few years for another. But, suddenly, Mother in Summer appears. What a devastating and brilliant collection, as complex and dazzling as Holiday, but in its own way. I imagine Susan Hahn never coming out of her room -- just writing and writing, oblivious and/or undistracted by the craziness of the poetry world and thereby able to give us such consistently expansive and extraordinary poems. But, perhaps, it's time for her to peek out--she just can't go this unnoticed any longer.