Review: Letdown by Sonia Greenfield

reviewed by Olga Livshin

Letdown
Sonia Greenfield
White Pine Press, March 2020
$17.00; 102 pp.
ISBN: 9781945680359

I first came to Sonia Greenfield’s writing after reading her prose poem that begins with an inquiry: “What is it about a sick boy that renders him gorgeous?” Illness and beauty swirl together in this poem. With its reverence and its feverish coloration, the poem evokes the Ill Child of icons and austere oil paintings, the holy space of a vulnerable childhood and maternal selflessness rooted in Christianity. But Greenfield also turns that narrative around, infusing it with the mother’s torture-love. Hers is the kind of love that pays minute attention–not to the mother’s selflessness, but to her selfhood. Even as her speaker addresses herself to the “you” of the gorgeous boy, she speaks of the mother’s ongoing “trial by fire kindled in your hearth.” With honesty and candid sorrow for the mother as well as an ailing child, she transcends the seemingly eternal, set-in-stone focus on the son in Pieta. 

That poem is now listed as “59” in Greenfield’s 2020 collection Letdown. The title is predicated on the riddle of motherhood. On the one hand, it refers to the breastfeeding reflex defined as milk coming just in time. It is that famous–seemingly synchronous and ideal–symbiosis of the infant and their mother: hunger-love tugging and milk-love arriving. On the other hand, darker meanings of the word are just as present: “a decrease in volume, force, energy, etc.: a letdown in egg production … depression; deflation.” Motherhood defies logical reasoning. Which makes it perfect for poetry.

Greenfield is not alone among contemporary American authors to comment on motherhood as a hardship, where nearly impossible challenges couple with isolation, and still, somehow, coexist with love. Prose writers such as Rachel Cusk and poets such as Maggie Smith, Carrie Fountain, and Julia Kolchinsky-Dasbach illuminate grief, trauma, and hard-won light as writer-mothers. Much has been said beyond the narrow constraints of our maternal repertoire of selfless love and wholesome cooking, a lie convenient for patriarchy. In Letdown, Greenfield appears as a particularly profound voice in the choir. This is thanks both to candor of the collection and the scope of its ambition.

Greenfield presents us with as many as three sources of maternal grief-and-love. There is the birth itself, described as “rage,” a “tsunami” sweeping through the “candy” of “Joni Mitchell’s voice,” nothing that a human being could anticipate or accept. Then there is infertility after the firstborn is out in the world. It is felt so stunningly, the phantom babies inhabit the mother’s imagination–as certain as the memory of a deceased parent. Finally, for much of the book, there are neuroatypical qualities of the child. In his early years, they are an enormous set of challenges, for the body as well as the mind, the child’s and the mother’s. These challenges, in turn, exacerbate the speaker’s desire for a second child: the speaker is “cheated out of a second chance to get it right.” But that is not to be. Birth, like death, is an abyss.

Greenfield’s stare is unflinching; it pulls us into disappointment, fear, and strange beauty. It forces us not to look away, complacently–or run away towards the shelter of pity–but to see. We see the speaker’s toddler son among the neurotypical and peaceful “kebab eaters”–then suddenly terrible anaphylaxis, all due to “tahini’s one-two punch.” Greenfield speaks of “death lurk[ing], wearing all white, … a waxen tear drop, a little seed.” We walk with the speaker and her small son in the hospital, as pronouncements of possible diagnoses collapse on the page, life sentences to this mother: “a primary demyelinating process. Translation: genetically fucked. Your brain eating itself.” We hear the dark irony even in that most mundane object, a young child’s slip-on shoe: the poet notices the stamp that says, “MAJOR TROUBLE”–“in a military font,” Greenfield notes sarcastically, but also, it is implied, major troubles of childhood (or even of a whole life ahead!). And that other ‘hood, that faux home, so forlorn as to never even be mentioned: motherhood.

The lenses she enables are to try on are diverse. Greenfield deftly uses language registers from lyrical language, with which she writes that long letter to the small son, to swear words–and to the brutal cold of medical language, that scalpel of words cutting through to horrific reality. The changes from one language register to another are shocking, exciting, and fully justified. They wake us up, and out of, poetic elegance.

Letdown also uses diverse, hybrid means in another way: it is a book of prose poems, and this is done beautifully, and for a reason. On the one hand, there is aching poetic beauty in the language Greenfield uses, and in its consonances, assonances. On the other hand, its prose-y qualities evoke the prose of life. Namely: powerful, brutal parenting life. That prosaic life of caring for small others impinges on poets and others, stealing swaths of personal time, personal voice, personal space. Bizarrely, however, it also grants new love and new–more profound–grace.

Throughout Letdown, Greenfield forces us to recognize the march of motherhood as inexorable, and sometimes tragic. Yet she also offers layers upon layers of fascinating detail and texture, into that “whatness of being” that makes any human life extraordinary. “Even the fountain in the courtyard knew uniformity is a farce,” Greenfield tells us in one scene. Adding: such is the “work of diversion, trying to make us see past what must look bad.” Arguably, such is the work of literature, too: it pushes us past black-and-white categorizations that look bad (or, like ideal moms, good). But unlike facile diversion–entertainment, distraction–it is filled with tangible, tangled, and endlessly varied observable detail. Letdown compels us–overworked, over-caring–to see what is right here, with us.

Suggestive detail takes on a particular weight in Letdown because it grapples against abstract categories that threaten to define the “you”–the beloved boy–in the poems. Some of these categories are doctors’ pronouncements, which paint a small human being as either impaired or well. Others are the words of seemingly well-meaning people in the speaker’s life, who say things like “We always thought he seemed a little off.” Letdown, however, demonstrates the amazing capacity of the speaker-mom to see even the very medical phenomena as anything but simple. During an EEG testing, she transmutes a potentially scary medical experience into poetry: “In the office I said, Look, now you get to become a robot, as the tech gelled wires to your head. I said, Look, you are a handsome sheik who must be still, with a white sheet wrapped around multicolored wires plugged into a silver box with a heavy cord leading to a computer that wrote thirty-one lines about your brain. I said, Look, the computer just wrote a poem about your legs and how they have a mind of their own.” 

Greenfield transforms the cold brutality of medical language into an ode, a playground: willfully, powerfully. She obviates the distinction between the abstract–and purportedly mutually exclusive–categories of “mother” (wholly devoted to the child, especially one with learning differences) and “poet” (an academic in their ivory tower). She shows they are very much in the same guild: those who rediscover the world.

Children are often overlooked en masse by adult literature–focused on adulthood, as it is, in a rather narcissistic way. Defenseless, not yet born into language, kids mean the darndest things, from innocence all the way to Gen Z, but they are not often allowed to signify themselves. In Letdown, however, children are seen. They are, thus, separate, and paradoxical, and mysterious, and, often, sad: for example, “delicate red-haired boys shunting something like love with their scrappy Santa Fe engines. Too old for this, they tinker and avoid eye contact as if I might glimpse the future there.” These lines remind me of Adrienne Rich writing about the “fatigue and boredom of the young who are counted out, / count themselves out.”

And the speaker’s son is the most outstanding child, defying uniformity in ways that both aggrieve and amaze. There are sudden seizures, and unexpected behaviors, and scary psychological evaluations, and delayed language development; but the amazement is all the more appreciated for it. When the boy speaks, he speaks in paradoxical poetry: “I don’t want to calm down, I want to calm up.”  This child echoes and expands his mother–a poet fond of complexity. “Does this splinter make me look fat?” asks the poet’s son. Not at all a death, as it had seemed in early years, he is a fresh start, full of word wisdom, humor, and quirky strength. Who would ever want to calm down if we can calm up?

In the end, Greenfield writes: “I feel bad for kids unfortunate enough to dodge diagnosis, how soft science has failed them.” Other children are “all set for middle management,” “their emotions drip, drip, drip” “while you go supernova on us everyday.” And Letdown is a supernova. I am glad its brightness, its explosive honesty, and its power are out in the world. May it find many viewers who will see their own decreases and gorgeous growth in it.

Olga Livshin lives outside Philadelphia with her tomato plants, raspberry bushes, lush sky, and other family. A poet and essayist, she translates Russian-language poets from Russia and Ukraine. Her work appears in the Kenyon Review, Massachusetts Review, Poetry International, Gyroscope, and other journals. A Life Replaced: Poems and Translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman was published by Poets & Traitors Press in 2019.