For Every Tatter is a deeply satisfying book of poems.  It is attractive and quite long for a collection, but the poems are short enough and clear enough to be appreciated without deep study. It provides a range of formal and informal verse, and the poems sparkle with wit even when they are about the very real problems and losses that come with aging. The book takes its title from Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium,” and has four lines for epigram that help direct its focus:

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tatted coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress.

The four lines cover the theme—what it is like to grow old, and how you deal with age without withdrawing from life’s experiences and challenges, how age itself, despite all its limitations, can be “sung.” The book is divided into sections headed by parts of the quotation, though many poems reflect the entire passage.  This book is a song of hope and surrender, enlivened here and their by caustic or playful wit.

This book is a special gift for older readers but it will appeal to all ages, because it details the era that has so fully passed and also the speaker’s reaction to the changes.  It avoids the nostalgia trap—the paralysis caused by the belief that the good days are over and nothing positive can happen. Christianity plays a part but subtly so, a part of the fabric. Doubt coexists with faith.  The sonnet "Dumbstruck," for instance, has an epigraph from Luke:  "How Will I Know This is So?" It begins:

Zecheriah, tending fires of incense,

You're frightened by Gabriel's sudden visit.

Good news is not always welcome is it?

Who sent this word? Does it make any sense?

And the poem, concludes

I, too, inquire, "Where's the evidence?"

Though I stoke altar fires with sweet incense.

The darker side of old age is compassionately described with poems of nursing homes, deaths, funerals, senility, illness, the decay of individuals and dispersal of things that were meaningful only to their owners.  But the darkness is alleviated by the sense that this is ultimately a purposeful universe; that there is a reason for our being.  The sense of worth, of purpose, does not translate into shoulds and should nots, but rather meditations on isolation and community, the spiritual and the physical. Some of the finest work is in the longer poems, reflections on a subject or theme.  "Breastworks" is a series of reflections on breast cancer, the first one, "The Tell," beginning

Having cancer is a bit like being pregnant,

the way it was once: the first week a great secret

granting time to integrate a crucial notion

into one's understanding of who she might be.

The poems use different forms and metaphors to describe the experience, including the powerful "Kintsugi,” defined as "...the art of repairing broken pottery with a joining of gold."  The old is "an unguent piecing broken bits/ saturating cracks, even replacing/ fragments lost forever to the tatami floor."  She perceives the parallel:

Just so, the brokenness I have endured,

the failing body, rehabbed hopes,

can not be sealed with some invisible

Gorilla Glue, nor carted to the attic

to be attended at a later time.

The flux of golden words,

the shining acts of kindness,

the laying on of hands

that have honored both my pain

and its release, must somehow be allowed

to gleam through me:

an aureate seam declaring what has happened...

These poems have linked themes.  They are enlivened by realistic scenes of  childhood in American’s age of enforced innocence, the fifties, when family was the focus for so many, and when gender expectations were clear and enforced. Both the pluses and the minuses of this life are evoked through details that ring bells for the old and enlighten the young.  

“Wit and wisdom” may be a cliché, but it is hard for me to find a more exact way to describe this work. Wit is in the irony that is woven through much of this work, an irony that comes from the awareness of how fruitless it is to try to evade the natural. As for the wisdom, these poems have a comforting moral compass, which is communicated subtly and indirectly though actions and details.

Style provides variety and interest—some of these poems are familiar patterns and others are unfamiliar patterns or free verse.  Boldt makes great use of a variety of voices—not only human voices but personification of other beings. There are ekphrastic poems, not only about paintings but about music and performance. She includes character sketches, and many poems about friends and friendship and about the nature of family.

Christine Boldt was born in Buffalo, New York, but once lived in Europe and Africa, and has lived in Texas for 40 years. She is an essayist and poet; her essays have appeared in literary and popular journals, as have her poems.  Her collection Missing, One Muse won the 2018 ASPS Morris Memorial Chapbook competition.  She lives in Temple, Texas with her husband. This is her first full-length collection, and it is a delight to read her work and think about it.

Janet McCann has published poetry in KANSAS QUARTERLY, PARNASSUS, NIMROD, SOU'WESTER, NEW YORK QUARTERLY, TENDRIL, POETRY AUSTRALIA, etc. A 1989 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship winner, she has taught at Texas A & M University since 1969. She has co-edited two anthologies, ODD ANGLES OF HEAVEN (1994) and PLACE OF PASSAGE ( 2000) and coauthored two textbooks and written a book on Wallace Stevens: THE CELESTIAL POSSIBLE: WALLACE STEVENS REVISITED (1996). She has also published essays on Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, and Emily Dickinson. McCann’s most recent poetry collection is THE CRONE AT THE CASINO (2013, Lamar University Press). McCann’s book reviews have appeared in WOMEN’S REVIEW OF BOOKS, CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE, TEXAS REVIEW, and many others.