Review: Erin Rodoni
On And If the Woods Carry You by Erin Rodoni
by Tyler Truman Julian
Erin Rodoni’s And If the Woods Carry You is a commanding interrogation of motherhood and the many complicated relationships that come with it: mother to child, mother to nature, and mother to self. Though often tender, these poems, unlike many similarly themed poems, roar from the page, asserting agency, demanding attention and asking hard questions of both motherhood and the reader. In a lynchpin poem of the collection, Rodoni’s speaker announces, “I want the poem to hold everything the way my body holds / the whole and holy me” (“Time Capsule: The Poem”). And hold everything these poems seem to do. There’s a depth to these poems; they face the pain of birth and the difficulty of explaining death to a child; they confront climate change and the myths we tell ourselves to hide from painful truths; they play in apocrypha and rule, forest and carpet; and they craft a complicated, relatable speaker, unafraid to admit, “childhood is mythed / and monstered” and wonder where that leaves the mother (“Lullaby with Fireflies and Rising Seas”).
Where is the mother in all the monstrous myth of childrearing? Rodoni’s speaker-mother declares,
In ever fairy tale, the mother dies
and is replaced by someone wicked. It’s true,
I want to keep you safe, but I want
to keep you mine. I never meant to fly
you like a kite. I never meant to stay
behind. But the mother is a cottage
the daughter flutters from, the mother
more cage than bird, and the parting clean
as licked sword. The future, a castle that can’t be
childproofed. And the fairy tale, still
open on my lap, is not a map.
(“Lullaby with Fireflies and Rising Seas”)
Where is the mother? The mother is lost. In the tight linework of Rodoni’s poetry, her speaker tracks motherhood’s frightening lack of a map and, furthermore, dives into a mother’s need to find her place in the world and in her personal journey in order to better accept her inability to childproof the future. In this way, the collection works—satisfyingly—full circle, following both poems that explore childhood trauma and adults reckoning with it, ultimately coming back to mother and daughter. In the penultimate poem, “Caesura,” the speaker-mother returns to themes of truth and mythmaking:
I remember hearing about them, the babies my grandma never had,
and though I’d never held such a seed in my body, I felt the want
of them. Five children with ghostspaces between. She believed
unbaptized souls went to Limbo, which to me meant low,
so I saw them spread like mica in the soil beneath her roses,
and in the gauze of grasshoppers that rose with every step
through summer grass.
…
After our cat died my oldest kept asking Where is she? I know she’s dead
but where is she? First, I spun a heavenplace, then I changed my mind,
stood her barefoot in the garden and said Here, look down.
The dirt is full of root and bone. Oh, my darlings, we are so small.
Lie down, back to summer grass. Feel how we are always falling
into that starspread black expanse. And feel too
the way the earth holds us, and we are held.
The truth that interrupts the mythmaking emphasizes the speaker’s growth of understanding, a clear arc in the collection. Her maternalism is not wrong because it is different from her grandmother’s, nor is it wrong because it is different from that in a fairy tale. The last poem emphasizes the complicatedness of motherhood, the desire for a fairy tale ending, but the speaker knows better, and Rodoni creates an ideal end—one that doesn’t deceive, one that maintains hope, but one, too, that is rooted in reality. In “While Hunting Mummies at the Museum,” the speaker-mother confides,
And because I might be vague
about the Tooth Fairy
and Santa, but swore I’d never lie
I have to say Yes
when she wonders, inevitable,
if she will die. The next
sarcophagus is empty, so I myth
it with a mummy, bandage-
wrapped and risen, then make
the promise, that is, at best,
only half mine to keep:
But baby, not for a long, long time.
“Love is laced always // with a stunning sadness” Rodoni’s speaker-mother tells us (“While Hunting Mummies at the Museum”). How true that is, especially for a mother. There is nothing trite or cliché about these poems. Every poem contains a surprise and takes you one more step on the speaker’s maternal journey, and also a life journey—nuanced in its challenges yet relatable in its anxieties. This makes And If the Woods Carry You a bracing wind in the forest of motherhood poems, chilling when you’re caught unprepared, your red cloak left at home, refreshing when you’re fatigued from a long day of chopping wood. This is a collection not to be missed.