Shannon A Thompson

23 days until the Minutes Before Sunset release!

April is National Poetry Month, so I thought I’d discuss a poetry collection today. So I read The Unmemntioable by Erin Moure for my Poetry Writing II class, and it is safe to say that I am in love. 

Moure’s poetry collection defies time along with persona. It’s the repercussions of identity within a family’s timeless love. As Barnes & Noble explains, “Moure’s poems, love is bound to a duty: to comprehend what it was that the immigrants would not speak of. Now they are dead; their children and grandchildren know but an anecdotal pastiche of Ukrainian history. On Saskatoon Mountain in Alberta where they settled.”

The history, along with the reflection from present day, is brought to life in the only life left to the known, knowing that the life is ultimately unknown. (Complicated, eh? But wonderful.) I have to admit that I also feel a connection within the mother-daughter relationship of the unknown. The speaker of the poems, Moure, is spreading her mother’s ashes in the Ukraine and is forced to wonder what exactly happened to her mother in order to understand who her mother really was, since her mother never spoke about it. (Considering how awful the Polish-Ukraine conflict was, this isn’t a surprise, but the contradiction this history caused is a thoughtful journey to take.)

Here are my favorite quotes:

“There are persons who can speak no more, whose very names have vanished. Yet a name excised from the verge where it once lived still casts its sound on all who sleep there and enters their throats.” (45)

“[Take me in your arms] a way of seeing then.” (15)

“Today I refuse to be pinned down to an identity. Right away, I want to betray it.” (19)

“That there is a before-speaking, that we did not always speak” (41)

“this was passed to writing and the content of a writing burned can no longer be handed back to memory, for writing abolishes memory and as what was written can no longer be passed down, it has no Author in the old sense: no ability to act as proxy to, to verify on behalf of.” (13)

“For if thought that exceeds what has yet been thought were not possible, the infinite would not be possible, and self/ itself or subjectivity its intermediary transcendence/ incendiarry.” (39)

Check it out here: The Unmemntioable by Erin Moure

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

~SAT

April 10: My Thoughts On: Young-Adult Fiction  

Tags: book recommendation, Book Review, chapbook, Erin Moure, Moure, Poems, Poetry, published, reading