Reviewed by Judith Skillman
Mimosas at Sunset
by Sharon M. Carter
Moonpath Press
$US16.99, Feb 2026, ISBN: 978-1-970256-02-4, 5
I am not a gardener, but was drawn immediately to the organic imagery of the opening poem in Sharon Carter’s new collection, Mimosas at Sunset:
Its flowers grow from spheroid
buds, bald as eggs or moons. (“Perennial Climbing Hydrangeas”)
Because I grew up in a family where we star gazed, looking through telescopes at the moon in all its phases as well as moons of Jupiter and other planets, this poem resonates. Carter employs personification, metaphor, and nuanced images to portray the human condition in its array of joy, ennui, and suffering. Our especial behaviors become a part of the natural world in this sequence about flowers from bluebells to columbine to roses to violas.
Carter practiced psychiatry for four decades. Her ability to translate perceptions, moods, and emotions from nature to humanity provides unique, original, revelations about the common flora and fauna of the Northwest. She is a master of the verb, the most important word in a sentence, and certainly in a phrase of poetry. “…vines ribbon, the ocean takes root inland, seed pods scab.”
From the lilac in “Childhood Lilac” we glean some of the author’s background:
Their purple
grazed my childhood window—
heady perfume
respite from cigarette smoke,
burning coal.
“Honesty” is another name for the money plant, as I learned to call this weed in my own childhood. It can also be referred to as “moonwort. Here “…their/translucent pods reveal all,/rattle silver moons/or dollars, each seed/a down payment for the future.” The organic imagery leans in and becomes philosophical, providing contemporary geo-political revelations. “On Losing a Douglas Fir” ends with these apropos lines, after the arborist and “His men” employ their chainsaws:
The tree trunk is lowered
in columns, like dismantling
the Parthenon.
Earth’s ruins at my feet.
A few pages later, the reader comes upon “Displaced Dogwood,” where the latest arrivals are brought from far away and inevitably become immigrants:
…they stoop
in the thin light, fold
into themselves
as if praying.
Carter’s title poem “Mimosas at Sunset” offers an epigrammatic nutshell of the author’s philosophy. Despite the inherent flaws of the mimosa—its invasiveness and monotony:
…consider this:
love the beauty
in your life
before it’s gone.
“Foxgloves” goes toward the wild side. This poem is written in first person, with Carter’s signature aphoristic closing:
Risk
the furious
apian within!
Reading “False Solomon’s Seal” we discover once again, as if we’ve not yet found ourselves performing this unhelpful habit, “…Humans love to compare!” The exclamation mark drives this point home. We are told, as poets, not to use the exclamation mark for punctuation in poetry, but rules are made to be broken. In this regard I see Carter as an advocate for both readers and writers. Her takeaway? We need to fully and completely feel whatever comes, whether or not a particular feeling is desirable, comfortable, or barely tolerable. No doubt these exhortations, mild in some cases, forceful in others, stem from her career as a psychiatrist in close contact with the various neuroses indigenous to the human species.
Here is an author whose taut, spare language challenges the reader. Not only does she personify plants, trees, and weeds, she identifies, for each, the surprising individualist within the genus. “Herb Robert,” one of my favorites, “aka Stinking Bob” in the epigraph, is called out for what it/he is:
Bob squats on my land
like a perpetual houseguest.
It is the ongoing exploration and search for equivalencies between plants and people that sets these poems apart and makes Mimosas at Sunset a satisfying book to read, savor, and reread.
About the reviewer: Judith Skillman is the author of more than twenty full-length collections of poetry, most recently, Subterranean Address—New & Selected Poems. Oscar the Misanthropist won the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award in 2021.