Comfort is a haunting, carefully composed, lyrical study of the lives of women settlers on the United States’ plains in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It conveys their labor and loneliness, endurance within prejudicial systems, courage, love, and unsettled emotions. Hardships are ever-present, yet the book also shows the pleasures and accomplishments of these women. Presented as linked poems in three sections, Comfort incorporates documentary sources, material culture, and a rich vocabulary in a well-wrought structure.
Poet Sarah Heady has a musical sensibility (she’s also written opera librettos); and the poems in Comfort are organized in movements that follow the course of a day—sunup, day, and dusk—and a general narrative of moving west, making a home, and living through the struggles faced by settlers.
The movements are composed of multiple women’s voices. They have in common a life of constant labor, of “efforting every day.” They express moments of love in their lives as well, such as:
: i loved you so much this morning i fed myself minutes of you.
And:
: o love you are large it mellows me out
While these poems are lyrical composites of voices, several characters emerge. One woman’s husband dies and the reader learns:
women inherit the worst slices of property : abandoned graveyard, only 2 arable acres, etc.
I just kept pulling bones out of the ground…
The poem closes:
As the gov’t road widened her property shrank into an overgrown triangle
The reader continues to encounter this character, walking the perimeter of her property, where she’s scratched by brambles, or coming across lengths of bone poking out of the ground. Late in the book, she despairs:
When you tell me about the frame around our pocket-world : the net
worth of my actions : nothing & i am the last one to swallow the earth
in this house : a hard clod : empty
Several poems work with the story of Susan A. Gavan, a forty-year-old Nebraska woman, who lost her young child and became known for eccentricity, likely due to grief. Her oddness led some to see her as a witch. Legends about her and superstitions about her grave site persist today. Heady casts her as “the seer”:
the other day wandering i saw a shape at property’s edge :
the seer effigy in her pocket baby on her hip
from all the way over there she somehow told me
you
will conquer those who would do you harm…
Reflecting lives lived in settings of the vast open prairie or confined in small homes, Comfort shifts between poems whose spare lines and individual words float over the page and poems made up of dense, rhythmic blocks of text as in this poem:
is a grass-filled track, a record. is timber & staff, the stuff of fairs. is a water tank filled with smoke, then snow. is a black wall battered with hailstones, brooms & busts & strawberry pie & lines of work. is ice against glass, is tables suspended in air : a tea kettle, knotted hair. the dog at a set angle, always, on the rug
Among its qualities is Comfort’s use of found language that includes text from Comfort magazine, published in Augusta, Maine, between 1888 and 1942. Heady was introduced to the magazine by Ed Dadey of Art Farm in Marquette, Nebraska, where she had a residency. She writes in the book’s notes, “Ed let me root around in the attic of the farmhouse where he was born, and it was there I found the copies of Comfort magazine that brought the project together.” The magazine’s tagline was, “The Key to Happiness and Success in Over a Million Farm Homes,” and its intended readership was rural housewives across the United States. It was created as a promotional vehicle for Oxien, a product purported to address, “stomach, liver, blood diseases, sick headache, dyspepsia, constipation, indigestion, lack of energy, general weakness, dizziness, sleeplessness, and female disorders.”
The poet uses this magazine material in several ways, including sharing full examples of advice from its pages:
CURE FOR CORNS
Take a well-ripened lemon, roll and squeeze, then open one end into a glass vial. Add to the juice three or six pearl buttons (according to size) such as those used on cambric underwear. In a few days (it will be found) the lemon juice has eaten up the buttons, so they can be mashed between thumb and finger. Shake well. A few applications will conquer the most stubborn settler.
In other places she combines short phrases from Comfort’s pages in her blocks of text or picks up the form and repetitions of the knitting and fancy work patterns that appeared on its pages. She also uses its late 19th and early 20th century vocabulary (e.g., auger, cadaster, catenary, quincunx, victual); and she plays with language. One tour-de-force poem mines multiple meanings of the word “range” and its role as a root for other words.
Similarly, the book plays with the word “comfort.” It’s an ambition for settler women as in this short poem:
was walking home one night when i said why of course that’s it
for everyone wants comfort
Comfort also is about discomfort. One finds it in the women’s stories of rooves “clean gone,” fires, illnesses, and deaths of children and livestock. In the collection’s notes, where Heady acknowledges the book’s setting on the ancestral lands of the Pâri (Pawnee) Nation. The white women who are Comfort’s subject participated in the land’s settlement and played roles in the genocide and displacement of tribes of the Great Plains and the Midwest. The poet cites Claire Meuschke’s writings about the guilt and psychosis female settlers experienced due to “the land not wanting you.” Heady writes “Coming across this passage several years after writing Comfort, I was struck by how the underlying condition of settler colonialism explains so much of the emotional landscape (unsettledness, discomfort) suggested by my book.”
As this poetry’s readers, we come to care about these unsettled settlers. We may not forgive the policy of manifest destiny yet have sympathy for the women who lived out the westward movement. Often, they were profoundly lonely, living far from a literal community. While the elixir Oxien was without merit, the magazine Comfort that it launched generated a sense of virtual companionship among them. Through it, settler women turned to the written word, reached out and helped one another. In this, the poems of Comfort and the history they reveal celebrate the life-affirming power of writing.
