Jessica Covil-Manet reflects on family relationships.
You don’t understand the title of the chapbook To Sing You. and to Shout until you finish reading all its 17 poems. Poet Jessica Covil-Manset packs powerful emotion, reflections on a family, and eventual resolution into those few poems in a way that leaves you impressed with the impact and reflecting on your own family dynamics.
Much of the focus is on the mother of the family, the one who leaves length voicemails, sings out of tune (and knows it), whose messages are sometimes, but not always spiteful, the one who is “my heartache / My biggest fan.” It’s not a flattering portrait, but it is also not entirely critical. And then Covil-Manset inserts this poem, and suddenly the picture changes.
Off-Color
Once, in Florida, my mother
tried to dye her brown hair blonde—
like Faith Hill, she had said then,
or my father’s other woman
When my dad arrived,
he, my older sister, and I
stood gawking at the scene,
uneven streaks of color screaming
accusation, desperation
but more than anything,
a wife’s attempt at being
something she wasn’t.
And how the horror
seemed to hang on this:
an unsightly shade of orange,
the failure of metamorphosis.
That one stopped me cold. In a few short lines, Covil-Manset conveys the desperation, the heartbreak of a wife trying to make herself attractive.
Something happens, though. Child Protection Services learns that there is no food in the house, and the next poem describes how a foster family kept her and her sister for a night, until their father arrives.
The next series of poems is more about the lasting impact, how family experiences shape and condition family members. There is fear, anguish, and misunderstanding, but there is also hope and a kind of resolution. As she writes, days are no longer “spent in endless mourning.”
Covil-Manset is a writer, communicator, education, and poet. To Sing You, and to Shout is her first published collection. Her poems have appeared in such literary journals and publications as Madness Muse Press, Rise Up Review, Rogue Agent, One Hand Clapping, So to Speak, The Maynard, iExile, SWIMM Every Day, and others. She works in communications at the Duke School of Nursery, and she lives with her family in North Carolina.
To Sing You, and To Shout is a collection of poems about coming to terms with family, especially one’s mother. And part of that is understanding that life, and family life, are rarely black and white. Your parents are people, not unlike yourself, with failings, flaws, and strengths.
Photo by Bernard Spragg, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
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