Tenderness and pain echo through generations of women in Rachel Jamison Webster’s haunting new chapbook “Hazel and the Mirror.” Each character struggles with leaving some facet of her life, whether the womb, her marriage, or her native land. As time shifts and voices intertwine, we confront troubling questions inimical to the human psyche: How does abandonment shift what is possible in our lives? Is trauma inherited? And what is released or contained in the undoing of a person?
Throughout “Hazel,” trauma reflects and projects through the mirror of time and history, revealing the void intrinsic to uninhabited lives. The struggle in motherhood to retain or to discover an identity separate and apart from a needy child casts a long shadow. Competing identities both repel and attract, as “the punishment of silence, the pummel of distance” obscure and injure the ties that bind.
At times it is unclear which character is speaking, indicating the melding of women into a united chorus of struggle as “…opposites are not different but dependent.” This work harkens back to Jamison Webster’s lyrical prose/poetry novel “The Endless Unbegun” released earlier this year, in which time is malleable and a relationship unfolds and repeats through the ages. “My present was my past/ and my future was coming at me/ in dreams…And one day we’ll slip out again,/ and all this will have been/ a single, evaporative breath” Jamison Webster writes. “Forgetting, remembering,/ we only have the space between.” In this space, spirituality and human connections flourish. Love is both anchored and awash in the winds of history; it never dies but changes form, knitting itself into the fabric of time. Both of these stories remind us that we carry on, that all matter endures. (Amy Strauss Friedman)
“Hazel and the Mirror” By Rachel Jamison Webster dancing girl press & studio, 28 pages, $7
“The Endless Unbegun” By Rachel Jamison Webster Twelve Winters Press, 152 pages, $15
October 29 Reading at Concordia University, 7400 Augusta, River Forest, (708)771-8300. November 17 Reading at Seminary Co-Op Bookstore, 1301 East 57th, (773)684-1300.
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At times it is unclear which character is speaking, indicating the melding of women into a united chorus of struggle as “…opposites are not different but dependent.” This work harkens back to Jamison Webster’s lyrical prose/poetry novel “The Endless Unbegun” released earlier this year, in which time is malleable and a relationship unfolds and repeats through the ages. “My present was my past/ and my future was coming at me/ in dreams…And one day we’ll slip out again,/ and all this will have been/ a single, evaporative breath” Jamison Webster writes. “Forgetting, remembering,/ we only have the space between.” In this space, spirituality and human connections flourish. Love is both anchored and awash in the winds of history; it never dies but changes form, knitting itself into the fabric of time. Both of these stories remind us that we carry on, that all matter endures. (Amy Strauss Friedman)
