The book’s first section focuses on memories of her early life and her mother’s last years. It begins with the title poem which opens: ‘I love your old age,/days when you repeat stories…’ These stories take Duran back to her childhood in the USA:
You can still go there and catch hold – those silver birches, that river.
You want to have all of it or become it.’ (‘The Past’) She brings alive the warmth and safety of burying her face in her mother’s coat as they walk past an icy building, the ‘pewter magnifying glass on the dresser/magnifying each hour’, the hairpins which won’t stay in the ‘heavy grey’ of her grandmother’s hair, the whippoorwill which gained an extraordinary hold over her imagination. Location and the memory of seemingly small incidents and details set off wider reference to America’s past: scenes painted by Edward Hopper, the prehistoric past which is conjured up by a remembered photograph in the National Geographic.
In the moving poem, ‘Dementia’, the poet shows how she and her mother support each other by drawing on the ‘forests’ in their imaginations and also how she gives her mother a context by filling in ‘the spaces/abandoned now by her memory/so the day shines and she is still in it.’ A sense of completion underlies this poem and completion in different forms is a theme central to the book. Its first section is also in part an elegy for Duran’s parents whom she refers to in a haunting image:
I miss you as if you were fiction and the ink still wet where we crossed paths – ‘ The ‘Zagharit’ sequence which forms the second section, begins with the adoption of Ramy in Algeria where Duran’s husband grew up and follows through the first years of the child’s life. The opening poem, ‘The Mat’, sets out the situation in which Ramy starts his life: the heat in Algeria and the explosions which could be heard in the children’s home where the babies ‘cried every day/each in his own abandonment.’ The details build up to the emotional weight of the last line: ‘Together we began our search for quiet.’ A difficult journey is delineated, not only the problems of adopting a child in a disturbed country but the poet’s own journey through childlessness. In ‘Courtyard’ she writes about the sadness of this condition, her longing to be ‘helpful’ and ‘included’.
She traces too the way she and the child grow together.
In ‘Lullaby’ she interrupts her singing to listen ‘to his breathing/in this deep country we live in together.’ Her closer relationship with Algeria, its troubles, the people she knows there is an important thread running through these poems which include childhood memories of her husband’s and list the relatives he lost in war. The lullabies which the poet sings to the baby are ones she learned from her father ‘that came down/through Spanish time’. The reference is one of several peepholes in this section to her past and they balance the peepholes from the past to the present that appear in the earlier section. The river imagery of ‘Confluence’ underlines the bringing together of different times in Duran’s life and the sense of fulfilment arising from a new start.
There are poignant poems both sections of the book which focus on women, not only the poet and her mother but ‘women/who give birth in secret’, ‘women who let their hair go uncombed’ and in the final poem, ‘Zagharit’ it is the cry of the women during a ceremony for the child which carries the keynote of this compelling book: …we all stand at the top of the stairs and the women begin to cry that piercing, throbbing continuous cry that is the transformation of pain, or the creation of pain to make room for joy, and I take you by the hand and the women follow you downstairs into the bright company’.
Myra Schneider reviews Coastal by Jane Duran. Enitharmon (London). 2005. £8.95.