Bond: a review of Hoods of Motherhood by Lindsay Soberano Wilson.

Bond: a review of Hoods of Motherhood by Lindsay Soberano Wilson. Prolific Pulse Press. Raleigh, NC. $10.99 paper. $2.99 kindle unlimited.

Hood is a four-letter word, so is bond. Each poem in this book is a bond, a bond between individuals and a bond between the individual and the group, between the mother in these poems and all mothers, a bond, a link, an intimacy, a closeness. Tillie Olson’s unnamed narrator in her iconic short story “I Stand Here Ironing” says of her firstborn:

I nursed her. They feel that’s important nowadays. I nursed all the children, but with her, with all the fierce rigidity of first motherhood, I did like the books then said. Though her cries battered me to trembling and my breasts ached with swollenness, I waited till the clock decreed. Why do I put that first?

The poems in Hoods of Motherhood evoke that bond. The author writes to know herself as a person. A poet, a woman, a wife, the mother of three sons, a daughter and a granddaughter, she thrives in her roles, and as a member in her community, and in the community of all mothers. In her thriving, borne of struggle and joy, she weaves a tapestry of language, poems that are lyrical, sensual, and spiritual.

The lyricism in Wilson’s poems is achieved by hearing and feeling, her manipulation of sounds and rhythms. Numerous poems are songlike, with repetitions of single words, short phrases, and, as with many songs, a beginning passage repeated at the end. The first poem “The Eternal Child in the Mother” begins:

Note “become worthy.” The poem is a process of becoming worthy, the passage repeated towards the end. The poem talks of passages, hunting, self sacrifice, and stumbling, and ultimately of crafting, of making the child, and the poem. The sense is in the sound and in the rhythms. “Bath Time Ritual,” a poem that accents sounds, ends with “the lullaby I used to sing to him.” And in the songlike “Mi Abuela,” the repetition of “worth,” “worth her words, worth her hope, worth her blessings” is a chant the varies the rhythms. Wilson’s sensuality is in her images. William Carlos Williams said “No ideas but in things.” Wilson intrinsically knows readers hold on to things. At the end of “The Red Japanese Maple” she says:

The wonderful thing here is the resonation of “new life.” The poem includes a daughter and her father. The new life of the tree foreshadows the new life of a mother and her son. “In the Waiting Room” depicts a photo on a doctor’s desk in exacting detail. “Roll Over,” a mother and son poem is rich in tactile imagery. A reader feels the infant’s rolling over. “Ice Queen” with its long lines sprawls across the page. She is described as

The many things in “Ice Queen,” Muskoka Lake, the muddy spring thaw, a styrofoam cup, the fog of murky green algae waters like a puzzle—a reader holds on to. This poem like others is replete with images that evoke a tone and suggest ideas. “Our Waking Ritual” renders the panoramic, a neighborhood, like part of a film.

This book is spiritual. “Voice Box” and “Now My Voice Box Echoes” attest to the spirituality of the poet’s quest to know herself as a poet, “I Birthed in Twenty Minutes, She Tweeted,” to know herself as a mother, and “Peace” to know herself as the mother of a family. “My Bubby Toby’s Secret” is affectionate and powerful, about the poet’s grandmother, the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Spirituality is found in continuum. The next-to-last poem is a tribute to the poet’s mother, and the last poem, “The Wise Mother,” a tribute to all mothers.

There’s a lot of love in this book, behind the scenes a lot of crafting, by a poet with something to say who is saying it well. Just as the poet says of herself “I Am More Than the Sum of My Parts,” so is her book. Like the great story by Tillie Olsen, Lindsay Soberano Wilson’s Hoods of Motherhood has soul.