Winter At A Summer House

Winter At a Summer House, by Mary Beth Hines, is an apt title for this collection of poems, which span the entirety of a human life, from “First Born” to “Late Love.” Divided into 6 sections, the poems look fondly back on times past, much the way a summer-loving person looks back on good memories when a seashell or old swimsuit is uncovered in the process of looking for a scarf or boot. The title poem, at the end of the volume, is full of shivering ghosts until one goes out of the house and dives into the ocean, where “she rises/ and plummets on the swells/of the white winter sea.” I got a copy of this book from Poetic Book Tours.

The best poems in this volume are about the sea, and the best one of all is “Scarborough Sail,” with its evocative description of a father playing with his child in the waves:
“I holler and squeal,
keel head over heels
before I crash, scrabble, rally
and rise—taller, brighter,
keener with every try
until I’m clambering over
his creaky shoulders to leap
through quickening sky
into whitecaps, foam splash,
a madcap bowsprit ride.”
Another sea poem, “Marconi Beach” describes “Atlantic’s blue heaves/white caps, churns icy foam” and a swimmer drifting as “beneath him teal shifts/to black. Skates skim sea’s bottom. Paired fins shiver, lift.”

Not all the memories are pleasant ones; but all are revealed through the curtain of lived experience. There’s “Put Out the Light,” for instance, with its quote from Othello giving context to a child’s confusion and an older sister’s blunt explanation: “sometimes grownups kiss. Sometimes they cut.” And there’s “We,” told from the point of view of “Yarrow/and Corn Flower, Burdock and Candlewick,/Lion’s Tooth and Purslane” who see people as “savage when they no longer/needed us” but who “fight back. We strangle their delicate/flowers with our bare-knuckled roots.”

Objects acquire significance in these poems, as when a speaker addresses a tree, saying “March maple gathering snow outside my frost-bleared window,/you have captured my prayers in your winter branches for years.” Or when someone opens a drawer to find “she left/behind shivers/of silky slips amidst old/lady underwear, sachets/of silvery scent, and a cool/cloth breast.” The drawer-opener sees that the “satin-kissed pillows,” left there “required/so little, only, according/to its faded tag, to be hand/washed warm and laid/on a towel to dry.”

“An Old Man in His Chair” shows off all of these methods for examining memory through the veil of experience:
The sea churns. Boats skirt the rocks
in the painting he hung in his little den years ago.
Now, he rides the waves as he files his nails.
Sometimes his children, smiling out
from another frame, join him. Though most days
he conjures their voices and recites, in order,
the beautiful names he gave them.
Then he stretches out in his chair on the smooth
back of a boulder, and lets the sea rush through him.

Anyone who has ever been lucky enough to spend a summer’s day by the sea will feel the pull of these images from memory, requiring you to swim parallel for a while in order to eventually emerge.