Book Review: The Stolen From (Anna M. Evans)Reviewed by Ellen LaFlecheMy favorite poems are those that are accessible on a narrative level while carrying within them multiple levels of rich symbolism, poems that beg to be read over and over, revealing with each reading deeper and deeper layers of meaning. Anna M. Evans' chapbook, The Stolen From (Barefoot Muse, 2013), is packed with exactly those kinds of poems. The book succeeds on a narrative level, presenting with grace and unflinching honesty the experiences of a writer who offers poetry workshops to elders at an assisted living facility; it also probes the topic of memory loss with multiple layers of metaphor. I approached this chapbook with much personal interest. My husband has spent his entire career working in the field of aging. For the past thirty years, we as a family have served Senior Center meals on Thanksgiving, attended parties at his work site, and mourned the deaths of elder colleagues and friends. The sorrows and joys of aging remain a conscious part of our daily lives even as we grow older ourselves. As a reader who considers herself well informed – at least theoretically – on the issues of aging, I was pleased that Evans' poems deepened my understanding of the intricate losses – and occasional triumphs – of Alzheimer's disease. She does this with her skillful story-telling and use of simple but powerful metaphors. My first reading of the book provided powerful images and vignettes of memory loss. Subsequent readings broadened my emotional and spiritual understanding of Alzheimer's disease. As the title suggests, Alzheimer's disease is a thief. Consider these lines from the poem "The Memory Thief": The memory thief began with pocket change The rhymes in this poem are playful, even joyous – an ironic contrast to the fear and confusion experienced by a person in the very early stages of memory loss. Theft functions as an effective symbolism in the above stanza, but just as powerful is the money metaphor. Money brings power, autonomy, status. Its slow disappearance means the loss of one's place in the world. It means the tangible loss of simple luxuries, like a good restaurant meal, or more serious losses like a home or savings account. But there are far worse losses yet to come, the poem concludes: … at last he stole your daughter Evans reverses a typical perspective on Alzheimer's. Most commentary about Alzheimer's disease emphasizes how family members must mourn the "loss" of a parent, grandparent, or spouse who can no longer recognize them. That loss is sorrowfully true, but here, in this poem, the person losing a family member is the person with Alzheimer's disease. A daughter not remembered is a daughter snatched away by the memory thief. Ending the poem with the loss of a daughter provides a powerful emotional jolt. The daughter has disappeared as surely as the dimes and quarters and twenty dollar bills in the first stanza of the poem. Having the daughter run away with the marauder, implying a kind of romance, deepens the emotional impact. The money theme is implied in a later poem, "Dementia's Diamonds", my favorite poem in the book. You shouldn't be blamed for treating memory The unnamed "you" in this poem slowly loses a fortune in symbolic diamonds in the same way that spare change was lost in "The Memory Thief." The early images in this poem are beautiful – crystals, rhinestones, mute stars falling to earth. The poem evokes a kind of childhood nostalgia – the rhinestones are reminiscent of the kind of inexpensive jewelry worn by little girls – perhaps a Halloween princess crown or a sparkling necklace borrowed from a mother's jewelry box. Although the reader is aware of impending loss, the sixth stanza still manages to startle. The stranger's face in the clouded glass looked worn, Evans' occasional use of the second person, along with her strategy of scattering rhyming poems throughout the book, provides a constant shifting of perspective and style. This shifting was a bit disorienting – which was exactly the point of a chapbook about memory loss. Flowers are another powerful metaphor that runs through the chapbook. In "The Stolen From", poems are flowers to be presented to the residents as verse bouquets. All spring I have prepared themed There is meta-symbolism here. The flowers are themselves poems, and some of the poems are about flowers. Or, rather, in this situation, the poems are about the memory of flowers. There is even a resident named Iris. In "Iris, Transplanted, " a woman with a British accent snatches a paper from the workshop leader. I don't belong here, she says, Iris, named for "the snowy blooms" " in her mother's fenced-in garden, crushes a Robert Burns poem with a hand that opens like a flower. Ironically, because it is depicted in the act of opening, the flower of her hand is pictured in its earliest bloom. This is a very frightening irony; a flower in full bloom represents youth and beauty and potential, but flowers in full fragrance may also appear at a funeral, in a hospital room, on the cover of a get well card. This shadow side of flowers is implied throughout the chapbook, providing the reader with the sensual pleasure of fragrant blossoms and the simultaneous threat of sickness and death. Iris appears later in the chapbook in "Zeitgeber, " a rhyming poem that depicts a small courtyard designed to bring outdoor pleasures to the residents while keeping them spatially contained within a small, winding garden that leads back to a door. Along the winding path, there are roses, laurel, and birch trees. For Iris fidgets there, among the blooms. This poem complicates the flower symbolism by asking a spiritual and metaphysical question. What does it mean to be a flower – an individual Iris, lost among roses and laurels? Evans' chapbook rightly focuses on the residents, but the first-person poems are important attempts to answer the questions she poses. In "Welcome Visitors", the teacher shares a strategy for honoring the workshop participants: Stupidly, I used to greet On the narrative level, this poem provides a useful strategy for running a poetry workshop for people with memory loss. But its deeper questions are mythic. Can we ever really know another person? What happens when we do? What is memory, and what is the role of individual and collective memory in our lives? I love this book, and only wish that the volume had been longer. I wanted to know more about Iris and Gloria and the Judge, one of the few male residents. A few images are expected -striking like a cobra, brittleness of her bones, but the importance of a volume of poetry that honors the experiences of people with Alzheimer's while transcending the limits of poetic memory cannot be overstated.
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