Reviewed by Kathleen Bednarek
Habitats: Poems
by Katharine Whitcomb
Poetry Northwest Editions
January 2024, 94 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1-949166-08-8
I started reading Habitats from a state of suspension as the poems moved in and out of a relationship with various landscapes divided out into the three sections of the book: Forests/Hotels/Dreams.
As Whitcomb says in her artist’s statement: “I write poetry to capture intensity of feeling, to examine the networks of cohesion that exist everywhere, and to marvel.” and this is particularly true in Habitats. I felt like I was building greater insight that I could take with me as I was just passing through.
Whitcomb’s poems capture varied global locales and domestic settings such as her home state of Wisconsin, and the Pacific Northwest. There is a balanced nature to Habitats set against a cerebral atmosphere that is easy to dive into yet mysterious enough: a person goes missing leaving the porch light on; friends revel in the ocean waves while another friend departs the earth. In the section “Hotels”, Whitcomb names some of the poems after mostly imaginary hotels stating: “None of the hotels in the titles and poems in this book are real hotels, except the ‘Hotel Poem in Istanbul.'”
To Whitcomb’s credit, it’s that the poems dedicated to all of the places and locales in the book assume a sense of authenticity. And I kept returning to the qualities of arrangement evident in Whitcomb’s work. The artist Joseph Cornell is mentioned in Habitats on more than one occasion. I thought of the dynamic dimensions of the enigmatic artist’s mobiles and shadow box art, and how there are delightful spatial qualities in Whitcomb’s work too.
For instance, the emotional depth juxtaposed with the sensation of clutching the ordinary, if not impersonal things of life; a sense of this collision palpable in the poem “Habitat”:
In that weird space, arms braced against
white enameled appliances, I bent screaming.
I had just returned home from living abroad
for months with a man who did not love me.
There are the more intense and dramatic lines in the collection but Habitats is rich in more unassuming poems. In “I Keep the Calendar Alive” Whitcomb interfaces with cattle through words and respiration, the simple act of a morning run transformed, shifting to a circling rumination, mirroring the movement of hawks overhead. She hones in on perspectives regarding mortality, a mindfulness arising out of contact with the oft overlooked. There is the punchy, clever assonance evident in the poem “Thrush Wife” where a bitterness and ire becomes transplanted onto the behavior of a bird: swallower of anger, thereby flipping the bird symbolizes peace trope on its head.
The poet explores these curious relationships where the subtlety of nature is magnified and exposed for its impressive and detailed intricacy. In the poem “Snowberry in Drought Season” the consonance of the language pressurizes:
Drought season
is a hard season after a hard season
& a hard one again. Snowberry
lives, rain-less, wind-battered, no matter.
Habitats is dedicated in memory of Whitcomb’s father and his figure appears in the book as a guide, interlocking with endearing memories. The poem “After the Apple Picking” follows her father from a great distance before Whitcomb angles into a memory of the man in his younger days, that carries the poem with an abiding tenderness.“Pratzen Hill” offers eclectic references reflecting surreal, disparate facts as her father in his final years recuperates from illness:
The room where my father recovered from pneumonia was his
meadow was Austerlitz
as he lay there looking up & inward.
If the Golf Channel played all day in the background
it did not matter. Those greens & whispers
were of the busy confluence of an outside world.
In Habitats, it is with an accessibility and elegance that Whitcomb transports readers onto the highway, staring back in the airplane, switchbacking on the trail and across the harbor ferry. Habitats opens the aperture, disclosing intriguing moments in a rich atmosphere of spaces crafted with wonderfully strange detail. You could refer to Whitcomb as “a gatherer not an owner” just like Joseph Cornell is mentioned in the epigraph at the beginning of the book. Whitcomb’s emotional curiosity is energizing, unifying the interior and exterior places she shares with clear vision and a compassionate voice.
About the reviewer: Kathleen Bednarek is a writer living in Pennsylvania. She is a current MFA student and has a MA in Poetry from Wilkes University.