Review by Meghan Sterling
Contending with Ghosts: The Tapestry of Place and Loss in Abbie Kiefer’s Certain Shelter
A few months ago, a fellow Maine poet reached out to me to ask if I would be willing to read her latest collection, Certain Shelter, thinking my residence in her hometown might be of interest. She was right—reviewing a collection that takes place in the town I now call home was an interesting read. But there was more here than connection to place. I read Abbie Kiefer’s manuscript with recognition and urgency, exploring each poem hungrily. Like Kiefer, I am a middle-aged mother with aging parents. Like Kiefer, I want poems to help me bridge my losses—and these poems do. These poems hit hard, but as much out of gentleness as ferocity. Like torn leaves tossed into the Kennebec River, these poems tender their touch—the losses they render rise as blossoms, as ghosts, as ashes from fire. I was left breathless.
An homage to her mother, to parenting, to the past, and to her hometown of Gardiner, Maine, home of beloved poet Edward Arlington Robinson, who pens her epitaph:
“Who knows today from yesterday/ May learn to count no thing too strange,” this collection captures the way we live by losing. Throughout Certain Shelter, Kiefer weaves the loss of her mother with the shifting to ruin of her hometown. As mills close and businesses are shuttered, as her mother is diagnosed with cancer and begins her transition into death, as her family grows and she leaves her hometown, Kiefer is left shaken. In her poem, All These Things I Can’t Remember, she writes:
…that slid-down town. Stilled factory and streets
electric with longing…
My mom there in dimness, in swallowing
pajamas. In those weeks when the Tarceva stopped working
for good. That’s where I remember her.
Not grading papers in the kitchen
or on the porch, talking with her friend who lived
across the street. Never weeding the tenuous
cosmos. Freeing peonies from the pull
of concluded blooms.
It’s not possible, even if I try, to remember
her in the window,
waving as we bring the boys to visit—
our son she knew, our son she could never know
who’s crying now…..
Kiefer grieves her changing town and her mother’s death, but doesn’t want to lose herself in grief, recognizing all of her life’s “generous pleasures”. How do we live fully in our lives when all we have lost tugs on our minds? In her poem, I’m Tired of Writing All These Sad Poems, Kiefer writes:
Oh Carol. We miss you.
Can I say that here, reader? In this poem about being
less melancholy? Because it is solace to say it plainly.
I had a mother and I miss her and I have joy
and a garden…
The key word here is and. We love and we lose. We plant and we bury. We witness the becoming of life and the end of it, sometimes simultaneously. How do we straddle the line between having and losing? How do we embrace life as we experience loss? How do we pay tribute to periods, places, and people who are gone? Certain Shelter is an exquisite poetry collection that explores love and joy when all is uncertain.
Certain Shelter by Abbie Kiefer
June Road Press, Fall 2024, $16,
ISBN: 9798987432839
Meghan Sterling (she/her/hers) is a Maine writer whose work is published in Los Angeles Review, Colorado Review, Rhino Poetry, Hunger Mountain and many journals. Self-Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora (Harbor Editions), Comfort the Mourners (Everybody Press) and View from a Borrowed Field (Lily Poetry Review’s Paul Nemser Book Prize) came out in 2023. Her next collection, You Are Here to Break Apart (Lily Poetry Review Press), is forthcoming in 2025. Read her work at meghansterling.com.