Undershore

by Kelly Hoffer

Debut collection Undershore from award winning poet Kelly Hoffer explores grief, loss, and desire. Undershore examines the speaker's ongoing grief following the loss of her mother to breast cancer against the backdrop of a sustained engagement with the natural world. The manuscript is structured around a series of "visitations"--imagined encounters with the speaker's mother after her death. The title "Undershore" is meant to describe the location of these visitations--littoral, submerged, oneiric--a space that is interior to the self while also at the edge of the self--intimate and peripheral--like the voice. Grief comes in waves, and so the title conveys the tidal nature of the mother's returning, her constant glimmering in and out of daily existence. To mimic this movement, the visitations occur at loosely regular intervals throughout the manuscript, the book turning with each of the mother's returns. In between each poem titled "Visitation" are nestled other poems, some tightly-wound lyrics, some diffuse, floaty things--all fascinated by the botanical world, by the shoreline, by desire, by intimacy and grief, and by the unexpected and inevitable way these concerns bleed into one another. The ephemerality of the flower as it moves through its cycle of bloom and decay (and finally, sometimes, fruit!) compounds and enriches the tidal movement of the poems. Gardens and oceans hide things; both have depths, shades, shallows. It is perhaps their shared habit of containing secrets that appeals in these poems, which also invite the reader into hidden spaces, into an undershore, without fully disclosing its secrets. Poetry.

Genres: Poetry

98 pages, Paperback

Published May 1, 2023

Reviews

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a fashion for rivers, a look to them where they’re surging, like a muscle that’s clean and seemingly still. I like feeling like I can feel the length of that line. That the line is for the water alone. Maybe the river is washing over a rock, or it’s pushing a branch down into the water. Whatever the actual cause for the river’s shape, it feels like the river is braiding into itself. A press for the river into its river body.

Many of Hoffer’s poems have this recursive feeling of liquid with liquid. A weaving into liquid sentences. Like a coercion of syntax. Or a syntax coercing a different rhythm so it’s more like a form of sentence. An insinuation of one. The result is poems that press like thought on the mind. Like the impetus for a sentence sustained throughout rather than just initiating the sentence.

It leaves me with the impression of a graduated grief when applied to Hoffer’s work. A grief for her mother who died of cancer. And one for what love is for the poet now. Love for a mother. The love she would have had if she’d been a mother. Romantic love. In all these situations, her loss accompanies how she describes these different ways of loving. The influence of loss. The threat that what she dearly loves could be lost. It’s an intensity, an immersion. A consistent presence. And I appreciate the variety of concerns that emerge in the poems. For instance, how perspective can be distorted. The ephemeral beauty of a flower, and comparing that to love, what the love might become once the loved one has been lost. The indeterminacy of individual words when specific definitions pull them in different directions.

Maybe the biggest challenge is what might be considered an inevitable use of this syntactic method versus an adoption of the syntax for a poem. Meaning, there are poems where it feels as though the syntax is what led in the poem’s writing, and there are poems where the syntax feels a bit like a device the poem deploys, because it’s effective in other poems. For my reading, this distinction was more noticeable in the book’s first third. And it’s really how the book concerns itself with the many other perspectives on loss, and the fallout of what is an excruciatingly felt loss for the poet.