Sundress Reads: Review of Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility

In Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility (Belle Point Press, 2023), Anna Laura Reeve draws readers into a stark landscape of myth-making, at times unflinchingly intimate while at others sweeping and vast. Through her visceral and frank accounting of motherhood and the orbiting discussions of fertility, identity, and mother-children relationships in the modern chaos of our world, Reeve forges a new mythology for mothers that defies all expectations; she acknowledges the rippling, tender underbelly of motherhood, its fears and wonders, its failings and surrenders. A vivid background of the natural world is woven within the poetry collection, providing another plait in this intricate braid of rich imagery and a stark eco-poetics that converses with our changing landscapes. At its heart, this collection feels like a battle cry for women, for mothers, and for holding onto all the wonderful, terrible threads of identity in the midst of perfect obliteration.

The collection opens with “Ars Poetica,” a poem almost confessional in nature, in which Reeve describes waking early in the morning to write before “It must be time / to wake my daughter, make the lunches” (xi). And thus, the split between artist and mother, something Reeve grapples with throughout the collection, begins. Reeve’s poem “Entrapment” speaks poignantly to this again, describing a distaste for the domestic in poetry:

“Reading poetry as a teenager, phrases 

like “my daughter,” “my son,” or “as I fold laundry”

extinguished interest like the smell of shit. The firm thud

of a diaper tossed in the trash

seemed to echo.

“Domestic tranquility” suffocated, like oil

On seawater.” (Reeve 61)

But Reeve challenges such discounting or disavowment of the domestic in her work by weaving her own myths and candor around it, wilding and bearing witness to the vacillating bleakness and brashness of motherhood. 

The first part of her collection opens with “The Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale” a contained accounting of the earliest days of motherhood. The poem depicts the immediate aftermath of giving birth with a haunting stillness, power in the silence, and the smallest of details. Instead of a time of unfettered and easy joy, as modern media would often like to portray giving birth, Reeve provides and unflinching account of the pain and fear so often experienced by new mothers, describing how a body that has just given birth is treated “like when you empty your bag into the trash / scooping, shaking” (3) with another line following starkly: “my own body sewn back together with steel / or plastic, still bleeding” (6). Indeed, the domestic world that Reeve illuminates is at times wild in its waves of changing emotions—cresting in moments of despair and frustration and ebbing back in moments of wordless relief. 

As the collection progresses, the contained world of mother and child expands to encompass the Southern Appalachian landscape, with the second section of the collection providing extensive and rich observation of the changing seasons passing over flora and fauna, and the mountains so often returned to in Reeve’s poems. The cyclical changing of the seasons and the vegetation, death and rebirth, parallel Reeve’s exploration of fertility and miscarriage, and the raw hope and devastation that accompanies these cycles. The poem “Trying” spins into an extended metaphor in which reproduction becomes the tending of crops, and a woman’s pelvis becomes the field, another kind of domestic care, laced with a stinging desperation:

“When the farm’s bright February seedlings

Faded pink and purple in the greenhouse, starved

By nutrient-poor potting media, we started over.” (Reeve 28)

Indeed, in this section, the landscape and the body become deeply intertwined, with the conclusion of this section. “For Southern Appalachia” in which Reeve writes, “Blood thickens on the uterine walls for two weeks, then / sheds. The ouroboros belongs to me, and the crow, / cicada, and scoliid wasp” (43). Such lines evoke a melancholy acceptance and even gratitude for the cycle of life and death.

Situated within the realm of the domestic, Reeve defies conceptions of motherhood and its singular identity in a string of poems within the last section of the collection. The “Mad Mother” makes several appearances in the titles of pieces, all of which speak to a similar theme of resistance against the surrendering of all other identities at the feet of motherhood. “The Mad Mother Discovers a Third Way” and “The Mad Mother Joins the Resistance” speak to societal expectations placed upon mothers: “Good mothers take care of everyone else” (Reeve 68). Reeve deals a snarling and triumphant rebuke against these ideals with the repeated words “Defy it” (68), providing a quasi-mantra to mothers with “your work is the real work. The real work is defiance” (69). What Reeve calls for is a return to the self, exultant and sacred, in the face of societal expectations placed upon the good wife, the good mother. 

In “The Mad Mother Envies a Widow” she avows that “the artist who is a mother splits herself in two” (Reeve 81). Here Reeve calls for a restitching, a returning to the self, something that she seems to be moving toward throughout the collection. Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility is a challenge to that split, an accounting of that split in order to make it whole in a new wild and beautiful way.

Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility is available at Belle Point Press

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