Review by Angela Williamson
Thoughtfully curated, Commodore Rookery, by Christy Lee Barnes, captures and recasts the first year of parenthood. Through the lens of the rookery, where the speaker goes for inspiration, insight, and wonder, the familiar challenges of parenting an infant—sleepless nights, feeding difficulties, relationship changes—become transcendent. The mother’s identity, rather than being merely lost or blurred, metamorphosizes—expands beyond the self, through time and across species.
Despite its lofty reaches and the recurring rookery visits, the collection itself is solidly grounded. Although not explicitly stated, the poems seem to be arranged chronologically, opening with “Late Postpartum Dream Sequence” in which the speaker declares, “I am bound with thick ribbons….” This poem, as is the case with the collection, is not about restriction. “I tied them all myself,” the speaker explains, serving up a set of instructions. “Now pull at a loose end / until it unspools. // Now flex a naked wrist, // which is healed, / which was never broken.”
The unbinding of this new mother seems also to have loosened the hold of anthrocentrism. In “At the Heron Rookery, Early Spring,” she laments the limitations of human motherhood. Noting the heron’s instinct and grace, she states, “I don’t have it: /…but I do my best.” The subsequent descriptions of normal play and instantly identifiable child/parent interactions become, in this poem, acts of rewilding. “I am speaking between species, / I am learning to forget language / to listen instead,” the speaker says, as she “leaves things undone”—household chores, self-care, cooking—and learns to “rest in the new softness of my body” and studies the bird to discern “her focus, throat full of food and certainty.”
Rather than thin, this volume of fifteen poems is compressed, and impressive in its scope and variety. In the poem “I’ve heard,” for example, the speaker begins a reclamation of the stories that existed “before the brothers got / their hands on them…. // Not stories, but spells ….” Following this is the first of the collection’s two ekphrastic poems, this one referencing a print found at a garage sale of the late Alaskan artist Rie Muñoz’s “Crane Legend.” (The second ekphrastic poem is a response to Liubov Popova’s painting The Traveler.) “Night Poem,” “Birthday Poem,” and “Aubade,” in which the speaker’s husband humorously recollects a sex dream, round out the collection. The sweet but haunting “Evening Visit” captures the tension that runs through the collection: in this world, security and danger coexist with few discernible boundaries, and we must rely on tenderness to carry us through.
Commodore Rookery by Christy Lee Barnes
Finishing Line Press, 2025, $17.99