The Second Child: Poems [Hardcover]

Deborah Garrison (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 6, 2007

Nine years after the stunning debut of her critically acclaimed poetry collection A Working Girl Can’t Win, which chronicled the progress and predicaments of a young woman, Deborah Garrison now moves into another stage of adulthood–starting a family and saying good-bye to a more carefree self.

In The Second Child, Garrison explores every facet of motherhood–the ambivalence, the trepidation, and the joy (“Sharp bliss in proximity to the roundness, / The globe already set aspin, particular / Of a whole new life”)– and comes to terms with the seismic shift in her outlook and in the world around her. She lays out her post-9/11 fears as she commutes daily to the city, continues to seek passion in her marriage, and wrestles with her feelings about faith and the mysterious gift of happiness.

Sometimes sensual, sometimes succinct, always candid, The Second Child is a meditation on the extraordinariness resident in the everyday–nursing babies, missing the past, knowing when to lead a child and knowing when to let go. With a voice sound and wise, Garrison examines a life fully lived.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With its accessible wit, and its clear, unpretentious depictions of young Manhattanites' worries and joys, Garrison's 1998 debut, A Working Girl Can't Win, won rare attention. The poetry editor at Knopf, Garrison resides in northern New Jersey with three young children: these poems chronicle her new, decidedly family-centered life, with the same offhand charm. Writing of infants, she speaks as a mother to mothers, understanding both love and fatigue: "Have you/ ever been in the shuttered room/ where life is milk? Where you make/ milk?" As her children grow up (and grow in number), Garrison's poetry follows them: "No time for a sestina for the working mother/ Who has so much to do." Other recurring topics appear through the lens of motherhood. September 11 gave her a "powerful and inarticulate" wish "to be pregnant"; charming amorous poems depict her continuing ties to her husband, the father of her children, and a bus ride through the Lincoln Tunnel reminds her that "life is good,/ despite everything." While many of Garrison's poems may not surprise, they may provoke shocks of recognition in many readers—parents, in particular—who should find both her topics and her tones reassuringly familiar. (Feb.)
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From Booklist

A New Yorker editor for years and now Knopf's poetry editor, Garrison has encountered a wide range of poetry. How refreshing, then, that her own work seems not to seek to impress but rather to speak to readers as if in intimate conversation. Some poems in this collection, which follows her acclaimed debut, A Working Girl Can't Win (1998), rhyme with a kind of playfulness that evokes nursery rhymes and feel perfectly suited to the major thematic focus--children and motherhood. Yet intertwined with poems about nursing a baby or a sestina for working mothers are poems that demonstrate Garrison's New York sensibility and an all-too-personal awareness of 9/11. Although the poems have a delightful appearance of simplicity, they subtly demonstrate Garrison's strong grasp of form and essence as they reflect on what really matters--like family, children, or just boarding a train to go to a job. They will surely draw readers in with their graceful appreciation of what is wonderfully ordinary. Janet St. John
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 96 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1ST edition (February 6, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400063590
• ISBN-13: 978-1400063598
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #967,472 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Treacle for the perfect mom with the perfect little children, February 27, 2007

By 

Sarah A. Gilbert "cafemama" (portland, oregon) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Second Child: Poems (Hardcover)

I loved Deborah Garrison's first book of poems, heard them read on NPR one day as I drove over the long miles between Charlotte and Charlottesville. I still remember sitting in the car and scribbling her name, the book's name, on a receipt. I bought the book immediately and treasured them for their melancholy, their understated humor. When I saw she'd written a book of poems about motherhood, well, I *knew* I would love it.

I suppose I knew wrong. Maybe it's just me, that I have no perfect attitude towards my children, that my two boys are far from storybook quality. Think of them more as dramatic novel material, stunningly beautiful, full of tension, rife with passion, that runs the gamut from dark to silly. But Deborah's poetry about motherhood is treacle. Simple sugars that may taste good for a moment on the tongue but then clog your throat with their cloying sweetness.

You see, Deborah's poetry has lost its melancholy. Her pieces about strangers ("I saw you walking") have that quiet introspective quality that I missed so. But her treatment of her children, of motherhood, is all roses and bliss. I find myself angry for being brought to tears by "A Drink in the Night", which isn't poetry, but a nicely-worded treatment of a cute story about her daughter, one that should go in the album to repeat at her wedding, one day, but not as literature. There is no wrong in these poems, not in "A Human Calculation" (full of self-sacrifice and adoration), not in "Both Square and Round." I love that Deborah loves her children so. But good poetry it's not.

When she forgets that all she is about is wide-eyed motherly bliss, she's funny ("To the Man in the Loden Coat") or packs vast meaning into a single moment ("Pink and White"). Her poem about having a third child ("September Poem") is almost what I wish it would be. What she is arching for, I think, to be Sharon Olds.

Sharon Olds she's certainly not. I won't read her birth poem at blessing ways. Her breastfeeding sonnet (much though I appreciate a good homage to breastfeeding) is too light, too full of sugar, "you grow so you / can go from me, I know, yet I drink in / the sweet increase that will divide us."

I wanted so much more.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Uplifting, Optimistic Poems About Motherhood, March 30, 2007

By 

Marion "[e-mail]" (Louisiana) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Second Child: Poems (Hardcover)

I have to strongly disagree with the previous reviewer. I found Ms. Garrison's poems to be uplifting, encouraging and as bright as the noonday sun.

I came away from the book with a smile on my face and feeling optimistic about the state of Motherhood in America today. Nobody has perfect kids, we all know that, and yet....we all want to believe our kids *are* the perfect ones. I know my two daughters are as perfect as perfect can be...as are their children. Don't be scared away from this book by one negative review. The poems are refreshing and upbeat and are about one woman's unique, real life. She doesn't claim to be Edna St. Vincent Millay...she just wrote luminous little poems about her own life experience as only she could do. I'm glad I heard Ms. Garrison on NPR and found her poetry.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Delightful Book of Poetry, May 9, 2007

By 

Ker "Ker" (New Jersey) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Second Child: Poems (Hardcover)

This book spoke to me. Perhaps because I too am a mother who lives in New Jersey and commutes to NYC on a daily basis, but I think anyone who has moved on to the next stage of their life, will enjoy Ms. Garrison's wry observations of modern life and parenthood. The poems are both moving and funny and she writes in an accessible, conversational tone.

This book was a great treat. I am considering buying it for my other mommy-friends.