Between Lakes

I want to give Jeffrey Harrison a hug. We’ve never met, but the poems in Between Lakes thrum with intimacy. Many of them deal with the final days of his father’s life and the aftermath of his death. My own father died last year, and a thoughtful friend gave me a copy of Between Lakes as a recent gift. How grateful I am to have read these poems.

These are not poems meant to comfort the grieving, and yet they do. Maybe that’s what I appreciated most about them. Harrison succeeds in communicating the vast complexities that exist between parents and children. Consider the opening lines of “Gratitude”:

My father and I got along best
during his last year and a half
when he had cancer. Saying that
feels wrong: one cannot be grateful
for a brain tumor.

And yet he did say it. It’s refreshing to read honest admissions of the challenge in navigating the loss of a parent even before they’re lost, navigating shared history, real and fraught, and ultimately resting in acceptance: “I’m grateful for / that year and a half, for those two springs [. . .] and for that new, / gentle father who kept telling me / how grateful he was that I was there.”

Despite the intricacy of their subjects, the poems in Between Lakes are not tangled. They’re not talky. Harrison’s tight lines are simple in the best sense of the word. Simplicity does not imply ease or laziness. Strong writing happens when the poet, after years of practice, engages the machinery of flow to achieve something that appears to have been effortless. The reader, of course, doesn’t see how long it took to build the machine. This is evident in a poem like “Last Advice”:

The night before my father died
I dreamed he was back home,
and I in my old room
on the third floor, and he
was calling up to me
from the bottom of the stairs
some advice I couldn’t hear
or recall the next day when,
standing over him
back in the ICU
full of the chirping of machines
we had decided to unplug,
I remembered the dream
and heard him call my name.

The uninterrupted tumble of those lines feels natural, as if the poem unfurled on its own. It’s beautiful, truly, and it doesn’t matter that neither the poet nor the reader ever get that last advice. Hearing a lost parent call your name is so much better.

Between Lakes is not just a book about Harrison’s father’s death. Though somehow, even the poems that don’t mention him still gesture at the complexity of what we inherit from those who raised us. In “Laocoön,” Harrison invokes the ancient Greek statue of Laocoön and his sons overcome by snakes in descriptions of a wisteria that has grown over part of his yard, “its thick vines twisting like serpents / around the invisible figure / I imagine struggling as in the famous / sculpture at the Vatican.” This is evocative on its own, but Harrison ups the ante with an abrupt turn, indicative of how the mind pivots in anticipation of unknown threats: “Or maybe I’m the figure, grappling / to cut the tentacles back / so they don’t engulf the house.” Personal struggles are often mythic struggles, however commonplace, and the metaphor is apt. One does not forget the challenges of childhood, of being a child and then becoming a parent. In his case, Harrison’s children have “escaped / by growing up and moving away.” But there’s no escape for the poet, left to contend with

this writhing monster of a plant
sent by some god as punishment
for a crime that’s different in each version
of the story and no one, including me,
remembers for sure, though I know
I must be guilty, I always feel guilty.

It’s true, Between Lakes brought me comfort in the wake of my own father’s death. It’s also true that it’s reassuring to see one’s daily family and parental dramas wrought so masterfully in poems that require little and give so wholeheartedly, that open themselves to the reader’s embrace knowing that in turbulent times we all could use a hug.

— Mike Bove