In her poem, “My Dentist Detects Occlusal Loss,” Abbie Kiefer writes, “Oh, I’m tender / towards relics.” And oh yes, she is. Her debut collection, Certain Shelter, is strewn with them in all their forms.
A poet and copywriter from Maine now based in New Hampshire, Kiefer calls back to fellow Mainer, three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, who has fallen out of favor, even in his home state. Not many people know his name, and even fewer know he was from Gardiner, Maine. But Kiefer brings him back, using a Robinson couplet as her book’s epigraph: “Who knows today from yesterday / May learn to count no thing too strange.” A fellow poet who leaves Maine only to write about it, she recognizes a kindred spirit in him.
It’s startling that someone who won three Pulitzers has become a minor poet. But to be honest, to be a poet is to be minor. One could feel discouraged by that, but Kiefer does not feel that way. “In Praise of Minor,” which opens her collection, starts off praising minor poets “faithful to work that will meet / with quiet” and goes on to praise a whole genre of minor things in the world. It’s a position (second fiddle, flyover state, etc.) that Kiefer exalts, and it’s satisfying to read the collection through this lens as it opens outward.
The six-section prose poem that anchors the book’s second section, “A Brief History of E. A. Robinson and the Train Station in Gardiner, Maine,” speaks directly to multifaceted loss: what Gardiner loses (mill work and the train station), what its residents lose (the ability to adapt to change), and what Robinson loses (his hometown—he left for college and never came back). The poem remains anchored in the exact dual histories of its title. Kiefer’s direct, unadorned language shines here and makes room for her sense of humor: “Built of brick and raw granite, the station echoes the design of Romanesque structures. Medieval castles and churches. Sheltering places. Architects, those optimists, call this revival.” The poem is satisfying, a little bit biography and a lot of what this book is largely about: how to cope with loss, when we’re the one left behind.
In Kiefer’s Maine, the trucks, soon to contain slaughtered chickens, have “waiting mouths,” “the air [has] feathers”—as if all that’s left of that life is scattered to the wind. Kiefer braids losses throughout the book; it can feel as if loss, like farm grit, “filters into every soft thing.”
If this all feels like we’re trying to hold back the tides of change and then romantically capitalizing on our failure, Kiefer doesn’t let us do this for long. She watches the parish house become a casket showroom; you-name-it becomes a cannabis shop. Change happens right in front of her. She knows “there’s hubris in being / built to withstand.”
I appreciated Kiefer’s efforts to both lay into loss, but also counteract it, such as in her poem, “Resolutions,” which begins, “I’ve been thinking I should lighten up / a little.” The poem goes on to imagine the speaker’s death, and she wonders who would urge her boys on. In another poem towards the end of the collection, the title bleeds into the first line: “I’m so very tired // of writing all these sad, sad poems.”
And yet, she keeps writing them, because that’s what poets do. Moments like this, elegy piled on elegy, reminded me of teaching Introduction to Literature at a community college, something I did for many years. When we were halfway through our poetry section of the class, inevitably a student would ask, “Do you pick only depressing poems?” As if the genre’s somber bent were somehow my editorial fault. With such questions, I would relish in responding: Poetry is depressing! Get used to it! Find a place to put your own misanthropic heart!
If you’re able to do this, as Kiefer does with much skill, you discover writing poetry is not all that depressing. It’s liberating. It reminded me of the saying, “Publishing a book of poetry is like throwing a paper airplane into the Grand Canyon.” It’s a vast landscape, and no one will care much about your flight. But oh, what a ride. What a view!
Kiefer ends the collection with the poem “Certainty.” It’s a powerful, indeed incendiary exclamation point to this already smoldering collection. In the poem, the speaker’s neighbors have been piling up debris: pallets, fence rails, barstools, brush. Then one night, they light it ablaze. The speaker had rolled her eyes at this growing eyesore, but now, “we have to admit this is lovely; / quiet cracking, tang of smoke. Its flicker // thickening the dark at the margins of our yard.”
A reader can almost hear the crackling fire, which creates a paradoxical hush that envelops all parties who stare into its embers. The bonfire is an incredible way to end this collection—it is a quiet, yet raging conflagration, and not without a hint of danger. The neighbors: “they’re good kids — but they’ve got // all night and they’re keen to keep feeding.”
But as is the case with any rebirth, it’s risky business. At the end, the burning fire goes brilliant. This one poem is a grand sweeping gesture that sends shivers back through what came before. The past, piling up on itself, blooms and transforms.
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Jefferson Navicky is the author of the novel-in-prose-poems, Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands, a Finalist for the Big Other Book Award in Fiction, as well as Antique Densities: Modern Parables & Other Experiments in Short Prose, which won the Maine Literary Award for Poetry. His book reviews have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Portland Press Herald, The Florida Review, The Maine Review, The Café Review, and The Adroit Journal. He is the archivist for the Maine Women Writers Collection, and lives in midcoast Maine.
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