Kinship requires a leap of faith and a keen eye for beauty in darkness

A review of What Haunts Me by Bernadette Geyer

by Serena Agusto-Cox

What Haunts Me by Bernadette Geyer is an intimate look at kinship and all the responsibilities and history it comes with. The narrator of these poems is looking at nature, their family, and events to find the source of kinship and whether they are deserving of it. 

Though she now resides in Berlin, Bernadette Geyer for many years was a vivid presence in the DMV poetry community and maintains strong ties with it.

In this collection, the speaker takes her readers on a journey in which she sees her hands not as her own but as those of her parents, realizing now that “the gift” she has been given did not come without pain. Geyer returns to the plants and soil, searching for the roots which have been present in aging parents and a growing family and daughter. The kinship she’s seeking is present: 

“… I find it as hard

to witness radiance as it happens,

just as hard to stop myself from trying.” (from “Heat Lightning”)

And like the speaker, many of us are looking everywhere for connection but specifically where we are in this moment. 

What haunts these poems is the past, like a “library closed,” but in “Preservation,” the narrator points out:

“In every town in every country there is someone fighting

to save something that no one else cares about, the world

full of stories that repeat stories told before. We cannot

honor every room that ever existed. How could we.” 

It is in our daily actions, our stories we tell one another, and the parts that we share over food and drink that become preserved — an oral history that preserves what has been and what has shaped us. 

Geyer initiates these oral histories with her poem titles, like “Long Before You See Them You Hear Them,” “What Barbara Told Us,” and “Explaining Cremation to Our Daughter at the Dinner Table.” We are asked to “Unravel it from its spool” as the narrator says in “Measure Twice, Cut Once.” 

And as we unravel each thread, it becomes clear to us that what is radiant is this life and all that has come before and all that we carry forward in our interactions with friends and family. But we can never forget that with life comes pain and disappointment, and those can cling to us, haunting our choices like a “bullet-pocked wall” in the former Warsaw Ghetto. 

Geyer’s poetry is an homage to the past and its ghosts, but it also asks us to be impractical and live in our beauty despite the pain that clings to it. Imagine that streak of lightning across the sky in the darkness — it is at once beautiful and destructive.

Bernadette Geyer is the author of The Scabbard of Her Throat and editor of My Cruel Invention: A Contemporary Poetry Anthology. A writer of poetry and prose, her works have appeared widely in publications including Bennington Review, Salamander, Barrow Street, Oxford American, Westerly, and elsewhere. A longtime resident of Northern Virginia, Geyer now lives in Berlin, Germany, where she moved with her family in 2013. Her translations of poems by German writers have been published in Asymptote and The Massachusetts Review. Learn more about Bernadette on her website and order What Haunts Me here.

Serena Agusto-Cox is a Pushcart Prize nominee, editor at The Mid-Atlantic Review published by DayEight, coordinates poetry programming for the Gaithersburg Book Festival. Her poems appear in multiple magazines and anthologies. To help poets, she reviews and markets collections through Savvy Verse & Wit and Poetry Book Tours respectively. Echoes Carry is her forthcoming debut poetry collection.