It's as simple as a mathematical equation: The Depression-World War II generation is passing away; therefore, baby boomer kids are undergoing the loss of their parents, a universal experience that remains one of life's most intensely private ordeals.
Not everyone is a poet who can both live and utter it.
John Marshall is one.
Scenes of a mother
Marshall has written "Taken With," a series of 26 poems about the decline and death of his mother, Eleanor Wallace Marshall, a lively, gregarious woman with a sharp wit who lived on Queen Anne's north slope.
The letterpress edition has just been issued by Wood Works, which published Marshall's previous chapbook, "Blue Mouth," a finalist in the Washington State Book Awards in poetry in 2001.
Marshall and his wife, Christine Deavel, live near Maple Leaf and operate Open Books in Wallingford, the one poetry-only bookstore this side of Boston.
(Marshall is sometimes confused with the other John Marshall, an author who covers the book beat for the Seattle P-I, and vice versa. Seattle is still a small town.)
Eleanor Wallace Marshall, widowed since 1994, was felled by a stroke in December 2000 and ended up at a North End care center. She died in February 2003.
Marshall records the experience without bathos or self-pity. The poems present a succession of scenes as chiseled and impressed as woodcuts - imagistic poems balanced with great tenderness.
Even for those who haven't lost a parent, Marshall's experiences hit home, like the lousy taste of finding oneself in an institutional parking lot in a time of emotional distress.
Away from her I folded into/my car in Building D's parking lot/and sat inside that trinket/ordered with others in lettered slots/then went from fraction to a whole/by backing up and driving off. /The difficulty was in how/to act the part/east bound on 130th.
And there is humor.
My distemper/Mother called the toothpaste foam/waiting for an aide to help her rinse.
"Mom got the good lines," Marshall said. "She was like that in life."
But those lines are followed by these, a tribute to Marshall's uncompromising eye and honesty:
All day long she said I'm D.I.C./my niece the veterinarian having once told her/the code for Dead in Cage. /Not exactly a pet now/an animal that's taken to saying thanks/for most anything at all.
Of his beveled objectivity, Mar-shall said, "If you're too warm, you push the reader away."
A resonating experience
Marshall said his aim in writing the book was to give the reader a sense of his mother. He's done that.
In the process, he's rendered his experience so vividly, it resonates with the reader - the universe is still found in a grain of sand.[[In-content Ad]]
