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The Keeping is a heartfelt collection that explores growing up in rural Oklahoma, engaging with the natural world, and paying tribute to women. From the very first poem entitled Our Mothers Would Not Let Us Watch, Linda Neal Reising casts the reader into the landscape of her childhood, a rural part of Oklahoma, where the lead and zinc mines played out years before, leaving those gaping mouths that never swallowed. She goes on to people the landscape with characters–a father who went to school with Mickey Mantle in No. 7 and Other Heroes, a cousin convinced he is being hunted by the F.B.I., C.I.A., Russians, and teenagers attempting to navigate adolescence during wartime, concerned with being faroutgroovyheavyman. Intertwined in this section is the author’s Native American roots.
The second section moves to an examination of the natural world, but even here, the animals are connected to people, as in Every Little Being, a poem in which we are introduced to a veterinarian who must euthanize unwanted animals, or as in Coyotes, a poem in which the animals are being hunted for their pelts. The poet also pays tribute to other women poets who incorporated nature into their poems, namely Jane Kenyon and Mary Oliver, whom Reising praises in her repeated line, I want to see with Mary’s eyes.
Finally, in the third section, the poet celebrates women at different stages in their lives, beginning with Women at Forty, a response to Donald Justice’s poem Men at Forty. Unlike Justice’s poem bemoaning aging, Reising’s work proclaims the joys of entering middle age when women, Learn to fling open/The doors to rooms they thought/They’d never enter. But, of course, there are also heart-breaking portraits of tough women who spend their lives over-worked and under-appreciated, as in Kate and Driving Lessons.
Throughout The Keeping, imagery, landscape, and emotion play a big role. Also, cast over all of the poems is the veil of story. Readers will most likely come away from this volume with a portrait of a person and place tucked away, for the keeping, in their memories.
