cover image How to Enter the River

How to Enter the River

Jeanie Thompson. Holy Cow Press, $6 (61pp) ISBN 978-0-930100-18-6

An aching, elegaic tone permeates the first book by this young poet from Alabama. Whether the subject is the passing of loved ones or simply the passing of time, Thompson invokes the sorrow of unfulfilled possibility and irretrievable loss. Most of her poems are personal, simply stated accounts of growing up and facing the responsibilities and occasional suffering of adult life. Her pain is true and deep, but expressed so artlessly that it evokes more pity than admiration. Who among us does not long, like Thompson, for the perfect communication between father and child on reading her first storybook together? Who among us does not pause at the accumulations of the beloved dead without whom we must go on living? Thompson is a creditable poet who has assigned herself the task of delineating her own cloudy emotional world. This is good enough, but she needs to look harder. November