They AbideElizabeth Dougherty Dolan’s moving collection of poems, They Abide, offers glimpses into a family album, alternating posed smiles with shocking candids. What is most consistent here is the author’s questioning of herself and of family history: “I missed my mother…. / But now I’d like to know why she, a baby nurse, / was spic and spanning phones and files. / Maybe she was sick of babies, / sick of us…” (“Split Session”). Like the images in a family album, Dolan’s poems freeze moments, revealing their subjects and their surroundings in sometimes crystal clear detail: “As a child I feared breathing lest I break / the blue glass slipper on her bureau” (“My Godmother Outlived Them All”). The subject of childhood is central to this collection: most poems discuss the childhood of the narrator, but other poems discuss her husband’s childhood in Ireland, a baby’s first awkward steps, a young student of the narrator idealizing an absent father. The collection weaves a series of references throughout, such as the execution of Ethel Rosenberg, firmly establishing the poet’s relationship to history and to culture. The poet’s concern with issues of motherhood and family responsibility carries much of the collection and in using so personal and believable a set of images and anecdotes, Dolan engages her reader. These poems are nostalgic – for Old Mother Ireland, for Old New York – but their nostalgia goes beyond simply revisiting the past. In each snapshot of a poem, she interrogates her personal history. Elizabeth Dougherty Dolan’s They Abide uses nostalgia to examine and learn from the casual, familiar suffering of childhood.
- Courtney Bambrick
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