Evening Sun: A
Widow’s Journay by Aline Soules
Andrew Benzie Books
May 2014
Reviewed by April
Salzano
Released
in May, 2014 by Andrew Benzie Books, Aline Soules’ chapbook, Evening Sun: A Widow’s Journey holds a
lot more depth than the title implies. In the first poem, we are introduced to
the speaker, the widow who suddenly finds herself alone at the kitchen table
“pushing potato and gravy/around [her] plate,” a moment many of us have had the
prescience to fear. The reader assumes not the position of the mysterious
stranger turning around in the driveway, so easily able to correct a wrong
turn, but that of a ghost observer in the now-empty chair across the table. It
is here that we remain throughout Soules’ journey through grief, from the first
day and its awkward “how are you?” of a stranger to the first night alone, to
the moment she faces the knowledge that she is going to age alone.
As
we flash back through italicized memories, as the speaker’s husband “get[s]
smaller,/further away, day by measured day,” composers keep us company, reminding
us of the strength of memory and the power of associations. Anyone who has ever
lost someone knows too well the pain of sorting through what is left: out of
style pants, rosaries, socket sets, and knows, too, the feeling of wanting to
ask the dead person what to do with these things, of wanting to hear the
impossible even more, the answer to questions you never thought you would be
asking. Soules captures this range of emotion with painful clarity, especially
in “Things I Need to Tell You. Questions I Need to Ask.” a title complete with
the finality of punctuation. “Place,” continues to ask the difficult questions
that will remain forever unanswered, such as why their son wants to buy his
father rather than scattering his ashes. The widow’s voice and note of
desperation at the weight of such loss, asks, “Does he believe that anchoring
the last trace/of your earthly life will heal the hole/in our hearts?” The
haunting “our” could just as easily refer to the wife and her late husband as
it does to the people left behind, as if the departed too is struggling under
the weight of such heavy, heavy loss.
“I’ve
Changed My Mind,” is perhaps the saddest poem in the collection, for all its
real-life imagery. The husband’s heap of dirty clothes, shaving cream spatters,
cigarette butts in the toilet remind us as wives that for all their annoying
habits, we would miss them if they were gone. If Soules’ intent was to make the
reader stop and hold dear the time we have together, it worked. “Hurry. Take
the picture,” the final line of “Notes V” tells us in Soules’ perfectly
duplicitous language.
