Unforgetting

In her achingly beautiful and wry Unforgetting, Christine Potter's speaker invites her readers into the spaces where her family deals with her mother's dementia, yet the purview of the book is vaster than that disease. "Unforgetting" is the undoing of a state of mind and is itself a kind of attention, both a vigil for the past and joy for a present before things happen: the moment "before the needle dropped / onto the LP. Before passing time limited / the size of the world." Though passing time is limiting, aging brings its gifts. The "trade off for not being noticed in the street" she writes in "Nice Lady," is to be "able to see and yet be unseen. I move freely among you now. And I take notes." Witty, smart, down to Earth, and pure in its honesty, you don't want to put down this deftly structured a book and when you do, it will pull you back to Unforgetting. Aliki Barnstone, Poet Laureate of Missouri Chris Potter is the master of braiding hawks, jets, and sinks full of Breck suds. Throw in a ghost or two, a memory of what never happened and you have poetry to sustain you with "the truth of such burdens, their unexpected heft." Potter is the poet with "black and white trains" connecting us from The Beatles to Seattle by way of the "stars buzzing above." "Listen to them," Potter implores, "Listen harder." When life taps too hard, Potter's poetry will always get us through to the other side of our own memories. Sherry O'Keefe, Cracking Geodes Open Christine Potter's Unforgetting is deeply generous and unfailingly honest. We are given vivid moments that contain the unexpected, cleaning out a car and finding "a paper fan that opens into a pleated circle of cherry blossoms." We find ghosts in houses and metaphorical ghosts of past selves that still inhabit past rooms and relationships. Writing of her mother in the title poem, Potter tells us "The stories flood away from her but still she scoops them to her lips and tells them." I take this as advice, something we all must do with what we struggle to retain. "Please, listen," this collection ultimately reminds us. "No place is really empty. Take this fruit in your hands and offer it. There is something more than just remembering." Jennifer Finstrom, Poetry Editor, Eclectica