The Pear Tree: elegy for a farm

by Bethany Reid, Lana Hechtman Ayers (Compiler)

Bethany Reid's The Pear elegy for a farm is more than a haunting elegy for a farm; it's a powerful evocation of childhood and a vanished way of life. In poems lush with detail, Reid renders the beauty and suffering of bygone days, not with nostalgia but with clear-eyed honesty, as each poem reveals its hidden facets. Under the watchful eye of a pear tree planted by a grandmother on homesteaded land, we witness the pleasure of day-to-day life rooted in the earth, the heart-wrenching loss of a brother, a father "who taught us to choose what matters and put a fence around it," a devout mother who can still play the piano when words have flown. "Who will gather what we leave behind?" one poem asks. Moving freely back and forth in time, this well-steeped, finely-honed collection offers a complex, satisfying answer.

-Holly J. Hughes, author of Hold Fast

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2024

Reviews

[Julene · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Pear Tree: elegy for a farm, is the Sally Albiso Award winner (2024) from MoonPath Press. Written by Bethany Reid this is a book that calmed me. It helped me remember the sturdy people this country is made of, everyday people who are true to their core and to their faith. The book slowed me down; reminded me of life in the country where I grew up; helped me remember the hard work our ancestors did and the difficult choices they had to make. In the three section poem, "Selling the Wetlands," her family had to sell part of their land, warned by the surveyor not to say the word wetlands at the bank. And this gorgeous line, "My heart is a geography of loss,"...

Many lives from our past sit witin us. In the poem "Pear," she sits buttering her bread with her grandmother's knife, with its "yellow Bakelite handle, / and my grandmother is here, shuffling / across my kitchen in her paisley housedress / forty years after her death." Of his character, in the poem "A Coil of Barbed Wire," she finds a curl of a rusted iron in the field years after her father died. She realizes her father missed going back to pick it up. Not his habit, he "drank / yesterday's cold coffee so not to waste it."

This eloquent elegy is filled with religious images such as the King James Bible, the prayer to forgive our trespasses, Sunday school, rapture and Jesus. There is faith and being raised by the switch. In the moving poem, "After the Fall," she is instructed to cut her own switch to bring to her mother, she writes "I stripped the leaves away, / carrying back / only the thin bare switch." In the poem, "Faith and Doubt" she explores her allegiance to faith, ".... Then doubt // crept in. Like a wasp / encased in a gall, // how it prickled to get out."

This is a large family with five siblings; they lived in a house filled with books: a dictionary, an encyclopedia set. In the poem "A Haunted House," she writes, "The house we grew up in was large, multi- / syllabic." and later, ".... Our father's books / muttered on disordered shelves, old men / who had went to war. It was a house / that held onto its secrets." In the poem "The Lost Brother," she writes —for Matthew, "I've dreamed you living in a cabin / in the tress at the back of our old place, / reading Dostoevsky and writing poems." In this same poem, "I know you're on that hillside / where we left you, your coffin turned away / from the marker because our mother / didn't want your head down and feet up / for all eternity." Her grandmother's family was larger, with fifteen siblings.

There are sensory fields full of wild plants: alfalfa, timothy, horsetail, tansy ragwort, curly dock, Queen Anne's Lace or wild carrot, foxglove. Reading her book of life on a timber farm in Lewis County, Washington, I heard the frogs singing, imagined the cows and horses, animals that keep them tied to the earth and to daily tasks. Maintenance and living the hard life up till death. The father had a brain bleed, the mother dementia. This is a story of family and farm life that is our American blood made of immigrants seeking freedom.

I have many favorite poems in this collection, below is a short one for one of her sisters with their horses. I love "that still place." Calmed and still is the place this book brought me to.

Years before Her Death
—for Lori

We rode our horses through fields bright
with dust and Canadian thistle to the creek.
At the back of the farm, ancient alders and fir trees
stood like caryatids holding up the sky.
The horses waded to their bellies,
plunging their noses where the pull of the creek
was greatest. I looped my stirrups
over the saddle horn to keep them dry.
My cousin unfastened her hair,
cupped a hand to the dark, mirroring water,
lifted it to her lips. This is the dream
of my childhood. All night I rein
my bay horse back to that still place. All night
I watch her reflections waver and beckon.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nature-heavy poetry set in the general western-Washington region but relevant to most rural Western areas. Consistent themes appearing throughout include childhood nostalgia, blue collar living, farming communities, and familial grief. Extremely readable-- a hawk is. Recommend to readers of Talk louder, Freak Show, and Mary Oliver.

Program topics: none

Discussion prompts: none