A Review of Kathy Nelson’s The Ledger of Mistakes — October 9, 2023 by Eric Nelson
Kathy Nelson is the author of The Ledger of Mistakes (Terrapin Books, 2023) and two chapbooks, Cattails (Main Street Rag, 2013) and Whose Names Have Slipped Away (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her poems have appeared in Asheville Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, New Ohio Review, Rogue Agent Journal, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and was the 2019 recipient of the James Dickey Prize.
[Note: The poet (Kathy Nelson), the reviewer (Eric Nelson), and the editor (Christopher Nelson) share no familial relations.]
The friction between the controlled, graceful surfaces of the poems and the intense, emotional turmoil beneath them creates the compelling energy of Kathy Nelson’s The Ledger of Mistakes. The main subject is the poet’s now deceased mother and their fraught relationship, especially during the mother’s final years, when she is confined to a geriatric psych unit. As Nelson returns again and again, both literally and figuratively, to visit her mother and to revisit their complex past, the book becomes not only a powerful collection of poems about mistakes, regret, guilt, and love, it is also a memoir in verse that develops elliptically, the poet orbiting the inescapable planet of her mother.
A prefatory poem sets the book in motion with two questions that haunt the entire collection: “Why remember the dead? Why finger / like prayer beads their hurts, hungers, / all I could never give them?” The first of the book’s five sections begins near the end of her mother’s life, when the poet regularly drives back and forth through a rural landscape to sit with her, a heavily sedated manic depressive. She no longer recognizes her daughter, but she is receptive to “such intimacy / with a stranger.” It is only in this reduced condition—“blinking, placid … her brow as smooth as an innocent’s”—that a reconciliation occurs:
I loved enfolding her, as though after long absence, and kissing the marble of her cheeks, forehead, each eyebrow, over and over, while the barrier, long ago erected, crumbled.
The poems that follow describe the mother in the past: judgmental, demanding, emotionally distant, and irrationally jealous of her own daughter. The poet’s father—shown in several poems to be a caring and stable presence—dies of a heart attack when Nelson is young, and she is the one who finds his body. Her mother’s response is not to offer comfort but to resent her daughter’s bond with her father—even at his death—and chastise her for not covering the body before she ran for help.
But the mother can also be seductively affectionate and appreciative. In the poem “February,” the mother “thrusts” a bag at the girl, “her sentences huffing / with scold.” But inside the bag is a piece of embroidery that reads “My Daughter, My Shining Star.” In “Lilacs,” the dying mother tells her, “I don’t want to leave you here alone,” an instance of empathy so welcome that Nelson repeats it in another poem. In “The Last Thing She Ever Said to Me,” the mother asks her daughter, “What would I do without you?” And, inside a greeting card with a picture of a kitten and a dog cuddling, the mother writes, “This made me smile and I thought of you.” The poet holds on to these unexpected moments of tenderness as if they might be proof that her mother did cherish her, though she is well aware that her mother is manipulative. Not long after she has said that she doesn’t want to leave her daughter alone, she asks, “Why did you never love me?”
For all the emotional and geographic distance between mother and daughter, one bond is their mutual affinity for nature, a love that Nelson absorbed, at least in part, from her mother. For Nelson, the natural world, which she describes in exquisite imagery, provides solace and an objective correlative for her conflicted feelings. The importance of nature to Nelson and to her mother is brought full circle in the parallels between the book’s first and last poem. In both, mother and daughter are in a garden. In the first, the mother “dug the green stalks [of daisies] to give them to me / something that would keep on living.” What would go on living is not the daisies, of course, but the memory of this gift—the mother’s love of nature literally handed down to her child.
And in the final poem, set after the mother’s death, we have this memory (or dream?):
When I arrive, she’s in the garden, as she was. No diagnosis, no documents of surrender….
She knows me—not the wrench come to dismantle her life, but her child.
Then, between the leather of her thumb and forefinger, she rubs the seedpods of moon plant,
teaches me to strip the dry husks, let the lucent disks shine like silver.
This poem begins with the poet longing “To make that trip again across the Appalachians. / To set off at dawn, early spring.” Her need to revisit her past—remember her dead—results, in this final poem, in an affirming sense of closure, like the shining silver light beneath the “dry husks” of a troubled history. The repetitions of L’s and S’s in that final line closes the poem with the soft, soothing rhythm of a lullaby.
Not every poem is overtly about the mother. In the fifth section, several poems focus on the poet’s own family, including a few lovely ones about a long and strong marriage, and “Taco Tuesday,” in which an ordinary domestic scene—the poet, her daughter, and grandchildren doing things normal families do while waiting for dinner to be ready. Ordinary family life so absent of conflict that the poet wonders if it is a mirage. In this sense, even in the poems that aren’t about the mother she hovers in the background, the reality against which all others are compared.
Throughout the book, Nelson’s impressive facility with language and craft is employed to great effect. Her diction is slightly elevated, though not stuffy, giving her voice a tonal authority, despite the deep uncertainty of her feelings. In both free verse and formal verse, received and invented forms, Nelson skillfully constructs tight containers for the turmoil they hold within them. Nelson’s obsessive return to her mother is reflected in the so-called “obsessive” forms she employs—the rondelet, the triolet, the villanelle, the pantoum, all of which require intricate repetitions of lines. There are also poems that reuse the same or similar titles—three “Boundary” poems, four “Electra” poems, and there are recurring images, snakes in particular. In “I Never Thought My Mother,” a vivid and stunning poem, the poet says that the copperhead snake that lives under her porch is the reincarnation of her mother:
I know she is my mother because her slow unspooling beguiles me. I know her because I can’t take my eyes off her.
The snake’s beguiling beauty yet venomous nature is a rich metaphor for her mother, whom, the poet realizes, will keep returning “until I no longer need her.”
