Reviewed by Alexis David
Mother, Daughter, Augur
by Mary Simmons
June Road Press
October 2025, $16, 99 pages, ISBN-13: 979-8987432877
It’s late summer now: nectarine and peach season. The light is changing. September is pulling at us and soon it will be October, when Mary Simmons’ book Mother, Daughter, Augur will come out. I requested this book during strawberry season and it came in the mail in July, when I was eating a lot of cherries. I wanted to review the book because its press, June Road Press, described it as a “Victorian naturalist’s collection.” This appealed greatly to me.
Emily Dickinson could be considered a Victorian naturalist, and like Simmons, was famously interested in both nature and death. In “I Tuck the Ghosts in at Night,” Simmons writes, “I have forgotten what it means/to be alone, to sleep without/death grazing my palm,/naming me nightly.” Death is often entwined with love, longing and the natural world in Simmons poetry.
Many times the poems reference dead women, who to me, evoke images of Shakespeare’s Ophelia–a very certain kind of romanticized death: a lovely young woman in a white dress who has killed herself. However, Simmons subverts this image. In “Ophelia,” she writes “I do not fill my bath with flowers/to be her, but because I want her.” This is another thematic impulse of the collection: desire, and namely the desire for the love of another woman and within that love, the feeling that Simmons can “save her from drowning” and become “not fearful/but feared.”
The desire for romantic love is seen again in the poem, “Witches in Love.” She writes:
We walk into the woods,
into the dark, the lantern in your other hand, its laughter
growing faint, and I kiss you, and I kiss you,
and I kiss you until I can convince myself
that I leave nothing behind, that some river still knows
our names and wants us, calls us home
Here, nature imagery is infused with romance. The gentleness of the soft lantern light in the dark woods becomes a symbol of the love between these two people. Their love is composed of the forest: wild and untamed. It’s haunting and electric.
Tangential to this longing for romantic love, there is also a longing for familial love. In the poem, “Firstborn,” Simmons writes, “I want. I want and I want and I bleed/persimmons.” The speaker often writes about wanting to be a mother and to have a daughter. Much later in the collection, in “Bedtime Story,” Simmons writes to a longed for daughter, “Really, little one, this time you can open your eyes and the forest is still/the forest and you are not a little girl, you are/a wolf.” Here again, we see an interesting kind of feminism: the desire to have a daughter and to make her into a wolf, to make her strong and fierce.
Often in this gorgeous collection, I found the theme of death to be that of decay: dead birds, dead spiders, pears rotting; the kind of death that winter brings. In the poem, “In the Small Hours,” Simmons writes of dead spiders, “their brittle petals,/their dull pigments/their spiders/in diapause, because in the belly/of the dead it is always winter.” The placement of this poem is quite elegant as the previous poem, “Victorian Hair Jewelry” begins with the line, “In the small hours, dead women pass/between aspens” and then the next stanza,“In the small hours, I know what it is/to shrink” and finally, in the third stanza, “In the small hours, I wander graves/to be surrounded by all those dead women.” These poems call out to each other, threading together a needlepoint of poems–something a Victorian naturalist might work on in the small hours of the day.
Simmons’ poems are often set in winter. In “Winter Remains,” Simmons writes “Window open all night, I dream/in snow.” In “Mother Tongue,” she writes, “I wept in her December/arms, numbed myself in her snow.” These are stunning lines, crafted with the gentle stroke of a Victorian naturalist; Simmons’ attention to the natural world is lovely. One line I particularly love is in“Ceremony,” Simmons writes, “How we forget the stars are long-ago light.”
Images are often repeated in this collection: winter, warblers, pears, spiders, the rain. In some ways, I say this as a slight criticism, but in other ways, I say this to simply point out the kind of rich poetic schema that Simmons writes from. Perhaps we are turning the pages of Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium. We are enchanted by the magic spell that Simmons has twinkled over us.
Interestingly, when I requested the book from publisher Sara Arnold at June Road Press, she told me that it was a “weirder one” of the two she was publishing. And, when I connected with Mary Simmons on Instagram, Simmons mentioned that the book inhabited a “weird little world.” I found this so interesting, because there is something quite odd about this book, in the loveliest way possible. I am wondering if the book is one giant persona poem from the point of view of a Victorian naturalist. The book does seem to live in a different century, an entirely different realm and I think that’s what makes it so utterly enchanting. Order it now and read it if you want to be placed under its transporting spell.
About the reviewer: Alexis David is a poet and fiction writer who holds a BA from Hobart and William Smith Colleges, an M.Ed from Canisius College and an MFA from New England College. Dancing Girl Press published her chapbook The Names of Animals I Have Loved. Additionally, she has placed reviews of poetry for Tupelo Quarterly, North of Oxford, Compulsive Reader and The Masters Review. Links to her other published work can be found here: https://alexisldavid.wixsite.com/alexis.