Reviewed by Peter Mladinic
Reflections of a Woman’s Life
by Gypsie-Ami Offenbacher-Ferris
Prolific Pulse Press
March 2026, US$10.95, Paperback, 42 Pages, ISBN: 9781962374750
Reflections of a Woman’s Life evokes the changing moods a person experiences in the course of a day, a month, a year. It’s a chapbook about what it means to be alive. It doesn’t not flinch from the darkness; it celebrates the light. As the poet says in her introduction, “This is a book about love and pain,” a nuanced book, evoking a myriad of moods. A study of disillusion, elation, and wonder in Offenbacher-Ferris’s poems yields an appreciation of their emotional depth.
Turning the pages of this chapbook, reading the poems, involves charting an emotional landscape, at times feeling disillusioned, as if things were going to be good but they turned out bad. “Free” evokes disillusion. The poet talks to herself. “Take these lines/ and follow me/ Into the land of darkness.” She does not flinch, or turn away. The light speaks to her. “Listen not to the dark one.” The dark one’s promises are lies. The light speaks the truth. “Suffer you will/ and suffer you must/ one day you’ll be/ Free.” It’s a dialogue between self and soul; the dark is the mortal body and the light, the poet’s inner self. Disillusion is evoked in a very different context in “Nibble at the Beach.” It begins with two people together at the beach: “he was here holding me.” Everything seems fine until a third party appears, and “Embrace dropped abruptly/ icy coldness rips/ away the warmth/ of his arms./ Who is that, I whisper./ My wife, he whispered in reply. Similarly, in “Feelings in Color” there are two people together and at first all is well. “I could smell the richness of each flower.” Then the mood shifts. “He knew/ that I knew he was afraid.” He has been in this house before, “when we chose our new carpet together.” Now he has returned, and she wonders:
Had he been crying? For whom had he been crying?
For me or for her?
Beige dissipated, fire red filled my eyes.
Filled my soul, while my once warm
beating heart, turned ice cold blue.
There is no happy ending here, but the speaker’s emotional clarity is her resolution.Seeing things clearly, what begins brightly ends in the darkness of disillusion. Disillusion’s opposite elation is evoked in other poems. The elation is subtle in “Chance Encounter.” The speaker is a grandmother wheeling a baby in a carriage in a store. She sees another grandmother wheeling a baby in a stroller, and the two women acknowledge each other’s presence with a smile. The speaker notices “thirty-something girls/ with designer prams” and feels “a touch of envy.” What lifts the mood is the presence of the babies. “Ecstatic babies gurgled at each other.” They make no distinction between the two grandmothers and the mothers; they simply delight in one another’s presence. Elation is sustained in the mother-daughter poem “A Mother’s Nose Noes.” The mother remembers her daughter’s childhood. “Her pretty, little feet/ now pretty, big feet/ did sport ten stinky big toes.” The mother’s tone is affectionate. Taken as a whole, this is a love poem, that conveys the bond between this mother and her daughter. It is as much a delight for the reader to read as it was for the poet to write it. “Reflections,” while it does not turn away from the darkness, celebrates being alive, the ultimate subject of this book. Here is its beginning passages:
Reflections
To be born
Is to live
To thrive and to grow
Is to begin
Begin to learn
To love
Nurtured into being
To be is filled with love
And to be is to be filled with wonder, an emotion that is threaded throughout this book. “The Arrival” is about the wonder of a mother giving birth to her child. While it is spoken in third person, the poem is so visceral it seems as if told from the newborn’s point of view. “Clutching at the foreign, warm five/ fingered hands, sucking, plucking,/ poking at skin rampaged by the/ stinging air surrounding her.” The wonder of nature pervades “My Garden.” In the garden death, in the form of a dead dragonfly, coexists with life, a snake and a toad. The speaker observes “A tiny bird’s egg/ cracked open/ baby bird flew away.” “Moving On – Letting Go” is about closeness and distance, the wonder of both the near and far. This poem begins with the mother carrying her child inside her, “first kick let me know you were there.” This poem’s white space signals shifts in time. The mother continues:
many kicks more until then
your time to enter this new world
arriving just fine and exactly on time
just now I looked up to see
a young man all grown now on his
own without me not needing a mom
so, it’s time to move on and let go
Moving and motion is central to this book; it is contrasted with the stasis of the dead dragonfly in the garden. The writer Munmun Samantha encapsulates this collection eloquently. “Offenbacher-Ferris’s work is a heartfelt exploration of the human experience, inviting readers to reflect on their own journeys of love and healing.” The first thing a reader sees is the book’s cover, an illustration done by the author of ships with masts in a harbor. Their dark reflections in the water have the effect of moving, shimmering while staying still. This same effect is evoked in these shimmering poems, that call to mind the line from Keats: Truth is beauty.” Offenbacher-Ferris, with linguistic skill, courage, and fortitude, has wrought from the grist of life something beautiful, and contemporary poetry is richer from her labor of love.
About the reviewer: Peter Mladinic’s most recent book of poems, The Whitestone Bridge, is available from Anxiety Press. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico.