Meridian, by Kathleen Jesme, Reviewed by Debbie Johnson-Hill

Reviewed by DEBBIE JOHNSON-HILL

In the brief space of two stanzas, readers are introduced to the paradigm of Kathleen Jesme’s poetry collection, Meridian. “It snowed for four days in the middle of January, during which my mother lay dying.” Jesme is not one to mince words or sidestep difficult emotions; instead she circles the subject of her mother’s death like a hawk over a barren field, landing only when words ring true.

Meridian is the latest collection from Jesme, an MFA creative writing graduate from Warren Wilson College. Her second book, Motherhouse, won the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize from LSU in 2005, while Meridian claimed the Tupelo Press Snowbound Series Chapbook Award.

Jesme chronicles her mother’s slow decline by juxtaposing blocks of prose with hauntingly beautiful poetics, leaving the reader to contemplate the writer’s impending loss in the void in between. The use of white space and variations in form, as well as metaphors of winter and earthly excavation, only further emphasize the irrevocable nature of the grieving process and death itself:

Meridian challenges the notion of life and death as a strictly linear narrative. Jesme is at once in the present moment, then traveling back in her memory to find a semblance of the mother she once knew:

Perhaps a book of this nature might appear too private, too emotional for readers to find their way into the depths of another’s grief, yet Jesme writes as someone trudging through the harshness of winter—with purpose and an eye for beauty, despite the circumstance.

Meridian is divided into six sections, but reads as an exegesis on a child’s grief, a deliberate chronicling of devotion and detachment, holding on and letting go. Jesme’s words crisscross the pages as tracks in freshly fallen snow; each word carefully chosen, each form an opportunity to cradle the final moments of earthly existence, offering readers the choice of walking with her, or wandering off into the hush of wintry woods to deliberate on their own truth:

Ernest Hemingway once said, “Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.” Meridian is a candid account of a mother’s death and a daughter’s journey, one which leaves the reader to ponder their own mortality, and that of those they love.