Unwavering and honest, Ann Gearen’s poems of birth and death, children and grandchildren, sunrise and sunset, illness and joy, suffering and triumph, laughter and love, and growing old while dreaming of youthall the passions and passages of living and learningweave a tapestry of exquisite language and intimacy and, as she says, moments of seeing. The poet’s love, energy and empathy, so durable and cast so wisely and generously into the world, rise from every line. What a privilege to accept her invitation to sit with me here in the sun. In the title poem of Ann Gearen’s haunting new collection, The Gate, Gearen reminds us that the gate/between the living and the dead,/on well-oiled hinges/swings open as well as shut. Indeed, her work wrestles with the sometimes unsettled, even resentful ghosts who slip through the gate and back, entering her memory and her poetry. But this deft and lyric work takes us through other gatesgates between generations as parents confront the limits of their ability to protect their grown children from the pain of divorce; gates between cultures and communities as evidenced in the sensitive, vivid poems of Hope Town, the small Bahamian village this Chicago city dweller sometimes calls home; gates over country borders; and gates we travel through on the way to becoming grandparents and wise elders. There are astute political poems and travel poems, and, in the final section, soaring love poems. These last are an ongoing ode to a long marriage, in all its complexity. Subtle, layered, sometimes wry, this collection, full of gardens and sea, memorable humans and full-on humanity, is ultimately poetry of relationship, of connections which are both fluid and forever.
What strikes me most about these wonderful and wide-ranging poems is the voice that gives them life, perceptive, open, respectful of others and constantly aware that at the edge of what can be said is always silence. This is a poet who knows who she is and what she is doing.
Poetry for the soul and senses, Ann Gearen’s The Gate is a collection that is accessible in its empathetic treatments of love, loss, pain and witness, but is multi-layered as well in the depth of this poet’s insight, artfully crafted through sound and rhythm to recreate the essence of human experience. Gearen is both courageous in her honesty and generous with her love.
