How You Came to Me by Kathleen Fagley (NWVS, #91)

How You Came to Me, the title of Kathleen Fagley’s new volume, aptly conveys the multi-layered theme of these splendid poems. Through them we experience all the complex emotions of bearing a child whose birth brings in a “Wedge of specialists/with shiny stethoscopes”. The language of diagnosis floats in the mother’s mind as a linguistic puzzle, and though used to describe Evan, is somehow disconnected from him. Evan’s birth is one way he came to his mother, and it is rendered in spare, precise, and evocative images: the onset of labor; the cut of the caesarean delivery. Then the poems observe, probe, question, and explore poignant moments, moments either painful or transcendent or both. All are rendered with an exquisite attention to nuances of time, place, other people, and the world. Reading these poems, I found my breath slow and deepen.
–Margaret Rozga, author of Two Hundred Nights and One Day and Though I Haven’t Been to Baghdad

Fox tracks in snow, preserved peaches like “squishy vulvae pressed against glass–”, baby bats killed by fondue forks, and a child no more defined by his damaged chromosome than by his name “Evan—-Welsh for John,/Hebrew for ‘God is good’”: By living fully within one life’s palpable complex of grief and beauty, Kathleen Fagley’s poems take us straight into a timeless and universal predicament: the costs and joys of living in that gray area in which we find our humanity. The unassuming strength of character apparent in these powerful poems is a reminder of the vigilance and, yes, continuous courage required to live and love honestly in this world of wonder and tragedy.

–Jane Mead

In spare, crafted, muscular language and stunning metaphors, Kathleen Fagley relates the anguish of having a child, a boy, Evan, born with the fragile x that leaves him severely developmentally disabled. As she struggles to come to terms with the child’s effect on herself and her family and with their decision to place him, it’s as if she, her marriage, the whole family is torn apart and put together again. These are important poems, shattering but life-affirming, full of insight, compassion and emotional power.

–Patricia Fargnoli

Rating:  ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]