Writing about what you really care about

Recently my 90-year-old mother completed a challenging 1000-piece puzzle, a collage of photos based on the Battle of Arnhem. The difficulty level sparked a real sense of accomplishment as the scenes emerged. Occasionally I’d help her; we’d whoop with abandon when an elusive piece was finally placed. Mom relished fitting in the odd colourful detail, like a girl’s pink dress, that relieved the mostly sombre tones. Despite the serious subject matter, the puzzle became a sweet catalyst for conversations about her wartime childhood.

Laurie Klein’s newest poetry collection, The House of 49 Doors, brought to mind Mom’s puzzle. These chiselled poems, embedded with the anguish of war, amalgamate to create a profoundly lyrical memoir. But even as she cauterizes her traumatic past, Klein’s wordsmithing inspires the literary equivalent of whoops of delight.

Fowler House itself, with its 49 doors, provides the whimsical structure for the staging of a series of revelatory vignettes. Poems emerge from its quirky architecture: the shotgun hall, the clothes chute, the stairwell, the attic. Equally fresh is the pairing of two key narrators, Kid Larkin, a curious and intelligent child, immersed in the immediacy of the present, and her older, more cautious self, Eldergirl, who gingerly peels away the scabs of the past. Larkin lives with her mother and her father, a WWII veteran. She also spends a lot of time with her beloved Uncle Dunkel, whose three-year stint in Korea has left him damaged: “Something’s not right,” the neighbours say. / “Do you think he hears voices?” Additionally, a company of improbable spirit guides, a snail, a bat, a garfish and others, offer cryptic advice to Larkin and Eldergirl as together they attempt to excise their secret horror, a “grisly scene” that “imprints, cell-deep.” Jesus shows up, too, a spirit guide of another sort: “the beguiling Love … calling our truest name.”

Larkin’s enchanted hours with her uncle, rowing a boat, playing guessing games and baking cherry pies, alternate with events of nerve-wracking tension as Uncle Dunkel succumbs to “slippage.” A subtle motif of combat imagery foreshadows the coming cataclysm: “dive-bomber robins,” “a timer that ticks like a battered engine,” a boat like a “warrior’s arrow.” Larkin has overheard some of Uncle Dunkel’s graphic war memories, but can’t make sense of them. She must also cope with her volatile father, whose unreliability leaves her vowing “one of these days my dog and I might stop waiting around.” She watches her mother, “little wifey,” kneeling in prayer in her bedroom, stitching her “pliant sutures” to repair the family as best she can. Eldergirl plumbs Larkin’s youthful impressions and escapades for resolution: “in the catch of memory’s breath, / reclamation goes on: a nail drops out of the paneling.”

Klein’s poetic proficiency dazzles. In addition to the inventive narrative structure, exquisite care is taken in the organization of the stanzas, the layering of imagery, use of rhyme and alliteration, specificity of word choice and visual arrangement of the poems. In fact, the first and final poems are house-shaped as Fowler House speaks for itself. But beyond technical virtuosity, the poems embody Klein’s observations about the vagaries of the natural world and human nature within an expansive empathy that convicts and inspires.

Frederick Buechner advised, “Write about what you really care about, what truly matters to you – not just things to catch the eye of the world but things to touch the quick of the world the way they have touched you to the quick, which is why you are writing.” In her book The House of 49 Doors, Laurie Klein has done precisely that, mining her personal pain to the quick, creating art that also touches the reader to the quick in the searing way only poetry can.