Review by DeMisty D. Bellinger
Dorinda Wegener’s debut poetry collection, Four Fields, is at once brave and vulnerable. She exposes all aspects of parent/child relationships, with the speaker’s mother, then father, in her richly written poetry. Although approachable, these poems require time to parse and readers may benefit from multiple readings to experience the book completely. Still, Wegener’s words warrant wallowing in for some time.
Divided into four parts, there is a metaphor centered in agriculture. Section I focuses on the mother figure, and the relationship between this mother and daughter—including the good, the complicated, and the painful aspects. “I Write You with the Intention of Amendment” is the first poem. Amendment implies an initial imperfection, or a need to change something that was established, and we learn of that need immediately in the first stanza, making the mother into something desirable as “a quart-berry basket filled with silver bells” and the speaker as dismal as “the dried carrion carried by crows.” The rest of the poem gives analogies to both wanted and unwanted things to the two women, and if not so clearly marked by desire, then a thing that can be a boon or a nuisance.
“I Write You with the Intention of Amendment” rejects the word “mother” (“I have orphaned myself from the word / mother) in lines that sound like a finale to a relationship but later, there is an amendable ending in the last stanza:
I create anew, name from your metronym and now understand—
momma, I write you with the intention of amendment, with thrift
to thrive penances: green as forgiveness, trepid as love.
The poems that follow this first gorgeously heavy poem cover memory, family, and love. The poem “Four Fields” follows the speaker home to the family farm, where she reinterprets the past with the hindsight the present has afforded her. The poem starts almost like an anti-Wizard of Oz return, whereas home is more dream than real: “At the silo door, / the family eidolon absolves me / my stalk paper and indelible ink.” She and her sisters are compared to wild animals—rabbit, bear, and swan—but her brother is in his Sunday suit.
Section I ends with the poem, “Next to the Child’s Bed, a Gessoed Statue of Some Saint,” bringing in visual art, too, which Wegener leans on quite often in the book. Memory also plays a role in this poem, which follows a child who remembers a past at a farm. Religion, like art, makes a place in this poem, opening the known world of the child and the presented world from the book to even more questioning of purpose and relationships.
Gesso makes an appearance in the first poem of Section II, too. This time, the speaker addresses a statue made of the stuff (“I believe you more than gesso”), and the semi-conspiratorial nature of the poem sets the tone for part two. There is violence in this section, maybe harsher than in the first section. The poem “Scene with Apparitions” starts with an abusive ghost, drunk on something. The poems here in this section are prayerful, but hardly peaceful. Still, we see how the speaker begins to advocate for herself and make sense of her mother.
And in this section, there is an atonement from a much maligned biblical character in the poem “Mirror, Mirror,” where Jezebel is somewhat vindicated and forgiven.
As Section III is dedicated to saying goodbye to the mother as she passes from this world, Section IV focuses on the speaker’s father, fading and faltering with dementia. The title for one of the last poems, “Father and Daughter, at the Adults with Dementia Home, Sit for Breakfast of Fried Eggs and Heirloom Tomatoes, Which Will Be Inherited,” could be a poem in itself! It says so much, and does so with clarity and rhythm, but the poem that follows that title offers so much more in context.
Besides writing, Dorinda Wegener is a perianesthesia certified registered nurse and, in this reviewer’s opinion, follows a tradition of medical professionals who are also gifted writers (see Wm Carlos Wms, of course, but also poet and physician Jenna Le, prose writer and psychiatrist Chaya Bhuvaneswar, and writer and nurse practitioner Cortney Davis). It is difficult not to imagine that the care Wegener has in her profession as a nurse does not extend to her writing, in that she is a careful and caring writer of familial love and loss.
Four Fields by Dorinda Wegener
Trio House Press, 2024, 96 Pages, $18 [paper],
ISBN Number 9781949487244
DeMisty D. Bellinger is the author of the novel New to Liberty, the poetry collection Peculiar Heritage, and the forthcoming short story collection All Daughters Are Awesome Everywhere. Her work can be found in various journals and anthologies, in print and online. DeMisty is a creative writing professor in the middle of Massachusetts. She lives at demistybellinger.com .