Review by Susan Blumberg-Kason
One of the most difficult parts of becoming a mother—even before a baby is born—is the worrying that never, ever lets up. There are worries during pregnancy that continue if and when the baby is born and then as children grow up. Even adult children cause great worry to their mothers, no matter how well adjusted or happy they may seem. Rebekah Denison Hewitt captures these many emotions in her new poetry collection, Creature in Bloom, which comes out just in time for Mother’s Day this year.
Hewitt has mostly called the Midwest home and holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was a Martha Meier Renk Distinguished Graduate Fellow. Creatures in Bloom was a very well-deserved finalist in the National Poetry Series.
In the poem, “Would You Rather”, she tells of her mother’s ectoptic pregnancy that was only discovered when a doctor ordered a test after other physicians diagnosed her with the flu. Hewitt writes of her own pregnancies and of the fear of losing a fetus through miscarriage, as well as deciding whether or not to have more children when it could very well be medically dangerous to do so.
Her poems reach well beyond her family and she writes of motherhood in general. One of the most devasting poems in the collection is “Good Guy, Bad Guy, Monster”, that revolves around violence in the US and in other countries, a mother’s worst fear. In one part of this poem, Hewitt writes:
When I was a child I was afraid an airplane would drop a bomb.
I was afraid of kidnappers. I remember passing a car on a highway, someone looking at me through the passenger window. I burst into tears, convinced he wanted to take me.
These fears were mostly irrational.
In this poem, she goes on to recount the terror and fears that come from the many mass shootings in the United States, a mother’s worst fear and a danger to pregnant women, who are already under enough stress. Later on in this poem, she writes:
The midwife says I’m becoming porous, literally beginning to open.
She says she thinks of transition in labor energetically—as two worlds colliding, as one world dissolving into another, as if the world becomes new with each life, as if the mother, then, is a maker of a child and a world.
But it’s not all gloom and doom and Hewitt leaves the reader with some words of hope in her last poem, “How to Take Your Own Advice”. It’s natural for mothers throughout history to worry about our children, yet we mothers are still going strong.
Shoulders back, in this new year.
You are too old not to think
the world is getting worse.
Do not be afraid.
Rinse your heart out. Proceed.
Creature in Bloom by Rebekah Denison Hewitt
University of Wisconsin Press, $17.95
9780299356248
Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of a memoir and two biographies, with a third on the way. She co-edited an anthology set in Hong Kong and is a regular contributor to Asian Review of Books, World Literature Today, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and the Jewish Book Council.