Mother Lines by Shawna Ervin

One could say that the rigors of poems written in received forms aren’t wholly unlike the strictures and structures of family life—you don’t exactly get to choose the lives your life is born among, nor do the words get to choose the shape of poetry. The gifts of such fated limits is that we must, in what freedom we actually have, find a way to make meaning. Shawna Ervin’s Mother Lines is moving testimony to this very effort, this very necessity.
Perhaps the deepest paradox of becoming a parent is that one feels all the more the child one still is. These poems know that paradox. And so it is, these poems grapple with the legacy of Ervin’s own parents, and in doing so, seek a way to learn, to grow, to alter the form her own childhood took, to let her own children awake more gently into the shape their lives are taking. That is a tender mercy and an audacious courage, another paradox Ervin offers us, the frictive spark of which reveals the poem as a force of love’s complications and utmost care.

–Dan Beachy-Quick

In Mother Lines, Shawna Ervin travels vast landscapes of motherhood. An adoptive mother takes her son to meet his birth mother. A weak mother leaves her daughter in the clutches of an abusive father. A woman transforms herself into the mother she needed and wanted. In precise and powerful poems, Ervin reveals how mother love, filled with awe and fear and doubt, must remain unresolved. As children grow into themselves and into the world, the mothers who guide them embody intense joy, deep sorrow, and loss. These poems embrace profound sharing, profound love.

–Peggy Shumaker

The pointed and focused poems in Mother Lines evoke both loss and hope. From the opening poem about bigotry found in simple spaces, to the last poem where this motherless mother confronts the impending need to let her daughter grow/go, the beauty of Mother Lines is that it does the heavy lifting in examining life’s most intimate relationships. The poet states, “In the dark I imagine a mom staying until I’m ready for her to go,” and later, “Your love was heaviest/when there was nothing left.” Mother Lines teaches us that both lines must be true, that loss lives with love and longing.

–Patricia Colleen Murphy, Author of Bully Love