Kaddish For My Mother, Marsha Barber
Borealis Press, 2022
Marsha Barber’s compelling new poetry collection, Kaddish For My Mother, can help us grieve as well as celebrate life. “Kaddish” is appropriate in the title for Barber’s collection in a couple of ways: it refers to the ancient Jewish mourner’s prayer[1], but also means sanctification in Aramaic, the ancient language of many peoples of the Middle East.[2] In a recent interview with CBC Radio’s The Next Chapter, Barber stated that she chooses poetry not only because she loves “language and imagery”, but most especially because she “wants to communicate.” Her poems are brief, often highly visual moments of recognition, or discovery. It should be no surprise that Barber made documentaries for many years. Barber is a long-time journalist and professor of journalism at Toronto Metropolitan University (the former Ryerson University), so why poetry? Over her four collections Barber has confirmed for herself that “Poetry is an extraordinary way of connecting with the deepest part of ourselves.” She told The Next Chapter host Shelagh Rogers that “grief, loss and family are universal”. Barber hopes that readers will relate to her poems and that they will “feel comforted and recognised.”
The subject matter of Marsha Barber’s poems is often “what’s closest to the bone.” Kaddish For My Mother begins with the back story of the shocking collapse of her parents’ marriage and re-marriage to another couple when she was a child. It also hints at Barber’s eventual expulsion from her reconfigured family at age 16 and the power of her ensuing rage. Growing up with such loss, so young, has sharpened Barber’s awareness as well as intensified her sensitivity and depth of feeling. The strongest poems in the collection frame its narrative and can be found in the first, fourth and fifth sections, “Empty Nest,” “Are We There Yet,” and “Kaddish for My Mother.” The last two sections are the most powerful in their description of Barber’s reconciliation with her mother, along with the challenge of facing her mother’s dementia and her own aging. The final poems about losing her mother are very moving. Touching poems about her children and some striking poems about navigating the wider world can also be found in the collection.
In the poem, “Punch,” the narrator recalls a childhood moment of realization that the violence in a traditional “Punch and Judy” show is not entertaining. The poem hints that it could even be familiar. More than anything she wants to go home with her parents who shortly after, begin talking about divorce. In “The Bell” the narrator’s father asks her “to ring the antique bell / on the mantlepiece / to warn him / whenever he was mean // so that way / maybe my mother wouldn’t leave him.” Even at age eight the speaker understood that “it was the only way / to save their marriage.” She rang the bell when her father called her mother, “The Brain of Britain” and told her mother, “not to be / so damn stupid.” In the end, the little girl cannot change the situation: “my mother met another man, / someone who didn’t require / a bell.”
In “Forgiving Your Stepdad” Barber effectively employs
second person to convey the lasting impact and surprising benefit of conflict
with her stepdad—his “yelling,” his “open palm”—
when she is fifteen. After an argument with her
stepdad the narrator escaped to the park swings until a man sat beside her,
asked if she had a boyfriend and pulled his penis out. Then the narrator “took
[her] stepdad’s gifts: / fury, hate / and screamed at the bald man / to fuck
off // while he froze there” … dick exposed, shrivelled, pink and white / like
a deflated balloon.”
In “You, Sleeping” a poem about the gift of her own children, Barber could be addressing either her son or daughter. She recalls them recently born, smelling “like soap,” / … “skin warm and plump,” and decades later, still watching them sleep, observing a “kaleidoscope of you.” For Barber “each version” of her growing children has “moulded” her into their mother, “created a better version” of her.
A number of striking poems appear in section II, “Wide Wide World.” The epigram to the poem “100 Seconds to Midnight,” which is about the advancing Doomsday Clock, reminds us “how close our planet is to complete annihilation”. “The hands… / rub against /the dark hour.” This poem and several others in this section, reveal Barber’s deep pessimism about the state of the world. As usual, she is skillful in her evocation of the negative feelings which can overwhelm any of us. The poem continues, “Absence pools in puddles, / footsteps echo / in abandoned streets.” “Beyond the alley / someone cries herself to sleep.” The narrator realizes the person weeping might be her.
As already mentioned, the most powerful poems of the
book can be found in the fourth and fifth sections, “Are We There Yet,” and
“Kaddish for My Mother.” In their description of Barber’s reconciliation with
her mother, navigation of her mother’s dementia and her own aging, the poems
explore Barber’s vulnerability and reveal her courage. The poem “Loving My
Mother” celebrates the almost ecstatic love between the reconciled narrator and
her mother.
“My Mother tells me / I’m pretty, // and just like
that, / I feel pretty. // My mother asks me / what I do again, // tells me /
she’s proud. // I’ve waited decades / for those words. // My mother tells me /
she loves me, // my love for her explodes / an airbag, tight / against my
heart.” Yet this revelation of love is too intense, “flares like an ambush //
too fierce / too much / too hard.”
In the title poem of section IV, “Are We There Yet,” roles are reversed. The narrator recalls summer days on the way to the seaside, “time passing slowly / the air itself / weighted with sand.” But the mother is the one calling the narrator to ask, “Are we there yet?” And asks the same thing again before the narrator leaves at the end of a visit. Where, “at eighty-nine / so urgently / [ does she yearn] to be,” Barber wonders.
In “The Aging Chair” the narrator’s mother sits in her chair by the window “just as her mother / sat by her own bedroom window / in the same chair / watching people / on the street below.” The narrator’s mother informs her that she is bequeathing the same chair to her. “It waits, inevitable and soft,” … to “unwillingly, / settle in.” We feel the narrator’s reluctant acceptance of this inheritance.
For me personally, the poems of the final section, “Kaddish for My Mother” are the most poignant and heartbreaking of the collection. In “Giving Up Her Name,” the narrator reflects on “The Sunday before / my mother died / she became lucid, the way / a stone / under clear water / becomes lucid, / the beauty of its cracks / and veins revealed.” The metaphor shows us the clarity of the poet’s understanding and connection with her mother, who tells her in that encounter that she never liked her name, “Josephine.” In an exchange which is a profound gift they say they love each other and the narrator realizes that she has begun to see her mother as her child. She remarks to her husband that that was the best visit she had had with her mother for months. The next day her mother sinks into a deep sleep from which she never awakes.
In the poem “Kaddish for My Mother” Barber evokes the power of her mother’s will, how she was someone to whom no one said “no,” who “always got precisely / what she wanted, // the most beautiful woman in any room.” There is “so little left: / some furs, a ring, vintage dresses”.
But the final poem of the book, “Clouds,” evokes the startling, visceral grief which confronts Barber as she faces her mother’s death:
“When the skull / behind your eyes / is a bowl of
tears / and if one, only one / should drift / down your pale cheek // the bowl
/ would crack / and there’d be / no end to it. //
When your throat / is a hollow waft of air // and your
chest / closes in upon itself / like a slamming door, // when your heart runs
wild, / thrusting itself against bone / like a bat in a trap.”
Marsha Barber’s poetry collection, Kaddish For My Mother, is beautifully written and courageous in its honesty about complex family relationships and their long-term impact. I recommend it highly.
