In her fourth book, Letters from Limbo, Jeanne Marie Beaumont confronts a family history long unspoken. Our first intimation of this unearthing is found in the poems of the title sequence, spoken in the voices of unnamed figures in “limbo” who request supplies—care-packages?—such as “Victrola needles (tungsten)” and a “rabbit’s foot…something soft at hand to pet” and depict their realm alliteratively as one that employs “lengthy lullabies,” “a low-key liturgy,” and “planned luminescence.” But the diffuse charm of these voices soon finds specific focus in the poem “Blue Sister Blues,” which elegizes an unknown sister who died in infancy of cyanic heart disease (a congenital malformation that leads to deoxygenation of the blood, causing the sufferer’s skin to turn blue) years before the speaker’s own birth. Suddenly, that need for “something soft” pierces us in the voice of a twelve-day-old baby.
Beaumont crafts these moments of revelation skillfully, allowing their “planned luminescence” to gather gradually, luring us with sound and image until the pivotal, almost casual detail takes hold. Consider “Fifteen Views of a Christening Gown,” a title that perhaps owes a debt to Wallace Stevens. The poem that follows, however, does not rely upon vignette, but instead constructs a narrative from detail, building from “fine linen flawlessly stitched / as silken as new skin” with increasing foreboding to “Something borrowed / that embraced something blue” to the final confirming “we buried her in it.” The patience Beaumont employs here is exquisite, defining her skill as both detective and poet; some truths, she knows, need little figurative clothing, and she is willing to move slowly—moment by moment, image by image, clue by clue—with an understatement that refuses artifice. It was only after reading the poem several times that I went back and confirmed that, yes, it contains fifteen stanzas, fulfilling the form promised in the title. The last five of these are monostich, the white space between each underscoring the loss described. Such close attention to the marrying of tone and form results in a poetry that moves us without manipulation; even the starkness of “we buried her in it,” which risks slamming the poem closed, is both softened and made real by the fact that it is overheard, spoken by a “she” we assume to be the buried child’s mother.
Wisdom in understatement is perhaps most vividly on display in the central section of the book, titled “Asylum Song.” Comprised of a cycle of poems that investigate Beaumont’s ma-ternal grandmother’s death, in 1927, following the birth of her fourth child, the section combines quoted medical records with remembered family history as a means of illuminating the cracks and pretexts in both. In the first poem of the series, “What do you call a group of…?,” Beaumont revises the taxonomy of various animals: “a siege of herons heredities,” “a drift of quails details.” Beyond the wit and linguistic satisfaction we derive from this list (other taxonomic groupings appear as titles throughout the section), Beaumont provides us with an eloquent and efficient delineation of her themes: these are poems in which family and heredity themselves are under “siege” and “details” are likely to “drift.”