That Said

Starred review from March 26, 2012
In Shore’s first retrospective collection, fortunes and fairy tales converge with real experiences—a daughter growing up, a mother’s death, an aging father, a young classmate killed in an accident—juxtaposing life as imagined against life as it turns out: “It didn’t weep the way a willow should,” the book begins, “Planted all alone in the middle of the field/ by the bachelor who sold our house to us.” Shore reflects on the passage of time—complete with Chinese take-out, Scrabble, and dolls of all kinds (American Girl and otherwise)—through poised ruminations on selfhood. In “The Russian Doll,” Shore writes, “I thought the first, the largest, doll/ contained nothing but herself,/ but I was wrong./ I assumed that she was young/ because I could not read her face./ Is she the oldest in this matriarchy—/ holding within her hollow each daughter’s/ daughter? Or the youngest—// carrying the embryo of the old woman/ she will become?” And at their best, these poems are deliberate, curious, and as unassuming as Bishop’s. Shore does what the best memoirists attempt: in describing one life, she describes the condition of all lives.