Review by Melissa Ridley Elmes
Sherre Vernon’s work has appeared in over 100 venues including The Chestnut Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and Westchester Review. Following her 2006 hybrid postmodern novella Green Ink Wings, which was the winning manuscript of the 2005 Elixir Press Chapbook Competition, and 2007 chapbook The Name is Perilous, this first full-length collection, Flame Nebula, Bright Nova, is centered on the journey from childhood to motherhood, tackling the topics of emotional trauma and mother-daughter relationships.
Organized into four sections (“Flame Nebula,” “What Is Flammable,” “Gravity,” and “Bright Nova”), the collection’s 45 poems range in form from free verse to the sonnet, vilanelle, and sestina; in structure from concrete to prose, couplets to quatrains. They delve deeply into the fears and joys of a new mother grappling with a difficult relationship with her own mother, desire to see her child better off than herself regarding agency and feeling loved, and the tensions between career and parenthood.
These poems are addressed to the child, Juniper. In the opening poem, “Augury For Spring,” the speaker wonders, “can I trust this fullness?” before lovingly adding, “you find me then, little fire-fish, / & fill me, & delight.” In “Honey Packets, Coffee, Wine,” she anxiously monitors her condition, wondering if she should continue to a writing retreat or turn back: “In every truckstop bathroom, / by the etched mirror, the split / linoleum, I’ve been checking. / Another drugstore pregnancy / test,” while “In Nebraska” she informs her unborn child that she asked “the woman behind the Wal Mart counter / for something to stop the spotting” only to be told “there’s nothing to help / but rest and water” and counseled to let her husband drive; “I want to tell her / that I’m out here all alone, that’s I’ll be thirty-nine by the end / of the week […] that I have spent a decade as still & silent as this highway […] & only now have you considered arrival.” She concludes with a gut-wrenching statement on balancing her personal and professional needs and desires; purchasing bottled water and returning to her car, she thinks: “how foolish I am to risk this, how selfish to want the sunlight / & the stars, the sleeping bag in the trunk—and you.” The ambivalence of wanting both career and child in a society that urges women to feel shame at not sacrificing themselves for their children is deeply resonant.
The poem that follows, “In Deep,” explores why she struggles with the image of motherhood: a family gathering—mother, brother’s family, and the speaker—during which it is revealed the mother “snuck off twice to smoke & lit up with the baby in the car on the ride home” calling forth memories of childhood trips in the car and how “we’d attempt to roll the window / down, gasp against the crack of glass for the hot air, the blue-grey smoke / weaving itself around our necks.” The brother’s children avoid their grandmother, crowding ahead into the family buffet they stop at for dinner. The grandmother is upset because “my brother’s children won’t walk with you as grandkids do,” indicating a deep wound borne of her twinned inability to show love and desire for the trappings of a grandparent, and her judgmental nature, documented in several of the poems (notably, in “Angel of Death,” where the speaker writes of her aunt “”When I was five […] you left for the summer / My grandmother said it was a calling, / following the Dead, my mother, / that you’d found an older profession”). This is a woman unequipped emotionally, destined for disappointment because she, herself, disappoints. The degree to which these relationships are filial duty rather than true affection is indicated as the speaker “take[s]her hand instead, paying again with the duty of my skin.” She tries and fails to tell her mother about her pregnancy, noting: “[m]y brother wept when I told him / […][b]ecause he loves me he pulled me in & held me in the deep,” but her mother is distant, unapproachable: “you can’t see me through the haze enough to ask for a light / […] You don’t reach across the seat for my hand, my hair, or touch my face. Don’t / you wonder what it was that brought me all this way?”
The rest of the collection documents the speaker’s journey to self-acceptance through the lens of a difficult childhood marked by a lack of self-acceptance and anchored by her troubled relationship with her mother, to which she returns over and over seeking a means of, if not reconciliation, at least understanding—in “I Spun You,” noting: “in my aching, I lean toward home / toward my own mother, so afraid”; in “Letter To My Mother, writing to her mother in rehab: “ […] yes, I understand it’s lonely in there […] I try to remember the warm bits […] But I’m telling you, it’s a fight / just to believe in love’s small possibility […] Mom, please don’t / call.” The arrival of the speaker’s own daughter is a call for healing, for releasing her long-carried judgments and doubts, the second half of the collection documenting the joys and discoveries, road to healing, she experiences through the toddler years. In “Dedication of the Fire-Fish,” the speaker finally and defiantly takes control, insisting on the occasion of a final visit to her own mother that the trauma will end with her and that she will give her daughter the unconditional love and agency she, herself, was denied:
Mother, I bring her to you to pay her respects.
I bring her for your pride
& your delight,
for the music of her laughter […]
She will never be lonely,
or know the discipline
of your streets.
I will let her grow lush, baroque […]
She will be unafraid & unashamed […]
& after today—
Mother—
She will never hear your name—”
This is a collection about the ways we let down and are let down by others, and the desire to do and be better as parents than those who have failed us, however unintentionally. Devastating and hopeful, heartbreaking and healing, unput-downable. Read with tissues handy if you are a parent seeking to disrupt familial emotional trauma.
Flame Nebula, Bright Nova by Sherre Vernon
Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2022.
ISBN 978-1-59948-936-0. Paperback. $15.00.
Melissa Ridley Elmes is a Virginia native currently living in Missouri in an apartment that delightfully approximates a hobbit hole. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Black Fox, Poetry South, Haven, Star*Line, and various other print and web venues. She is the author of two poetry collections: Arthurian Things (Dark Myth Publications, 2020) and Dreamscapes and Dark Corners ( Alien Buddha Press, 2023). Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Elgin, Rhysling, and Dwarf Star awards.