Alive through the Ghosts of the Past
Building a Nest from the Bones of My People, Cara-Lyn Morgan. Invisible Publishing, 2023.
Cara-Lyn Morgan’s Building a Nest from the Bones of My People is the awardwinning author’s third book of poetry. Although written in short, fragmented lyrics, the book has a complete story arc, moving from the speaker’s engagement to her husband to the birth of her child. Imbued with the haunting of ancestral suffering, the poet struggles through a process of transformation to come to terms with motherhood and the intergenerational “gifts” she thinks she will surely pass on to her daughter:
I can offer you
sleeplessness,
hard drinking,
chronic scratching, and
binge eating.
The understanding
that lucky ones survive
but live
with shut mouths. (26)
The silence of the past — a voicelessness that the poems themselves strive to counter — materializes as harm marking the body. But through her fear and uncertainty about bringing a child into the familial legacy of trauma, the speaker of these poems recites an equally potent affirmation: “I / will be a mother” (26). Wavering between doubt and belief, the collection chronicles a story of coming to life through resiliency.
The nest of the collection’s title is sometimes the mother’s womb or body, and sometimes the foetus itself: “a hard nest / beneath my ribs” (30). The materials for the nest are from not only the bones of ancestors but also pieces of the mother herself, who is in constant dread of falling apart. In the collection’s opening poem, “Words, scattered,” the speaker imagines casting off parts of her body:
I dreamed I shed my fingernails
to their nervy beds, and spread
each along the fallow
so wildflowers
might spring up, bloody. (1)
Recurring images of bodies torn apart — bodies coming loose — form a central motif in the collection. These feed the speaker’s fear about her child not staying in one piece. She dreams of giving birth in a motel bed, the baby coming out “small as a piglet”: “I dipped you, cup-sized, / into the water,” she says, “and slowly / you came apart in my hands” (63). She fears for survival and continuity. But just as the poet builds a nest out of bones, she must make language that has been lost to past generations out of the scraps she does possess:
The thing
we have lost
among others is our word
for a deep and settled sleep. A word for good
memory — the Michif for unforced
sobriety, a word that tells me
I can mother. Shows me
how to speak
these secrets. (27)
While the pain in these poems is deeply personal, Morgan peppers the collection with hints of the wider, historical scope of family trauma. For example, the poem “We are the dream” mentions the 2016 United States federal election, expressing a deep and raw dismay at the election’s results. It alludes to Langston Hughes’ poem “Harlem,” which begins “What happens to a dream deferred?” Here is the beginning of Morgan’s poem:
We are the dream
deferred.
We did not explode.
At the tail-end of the battle, we failed
to recognize
there was price
to be paid
for this pride. (47)
While Hughes’ poem ends in a question about the deferred dream — “Or does it explode?,” evoking the possibility of riot or revolution led by marginalized communities in Harlem — Morgan responds with sadness at the laxity of the community that “did not explode.” In a narrative sense, this poem only tenuously fits with the others in the book. However, “We are the dream” makes the associative link between intergenerational suffering and historical oppression clear: the speaker’s personal plight, and the anxiety she harbours for the sake of her daughter, would not exist without the broader geographical and historical lens that the poem provides.
The book is powerful, candid, and honest. Morgan achieves this through her short and incisive lines, attention to space on the page, and language that veers toward the surreal and uncanny. In many ways, the poems are small and precious objects that grow in weight alongside the foetus, which begins as “a poppy seed” (18) and inevitably morphs into an “[o]range seed” (26), “a sweet pea” (29), “a strawberry” (36), “a tamarind / ball, sugared” (40), “a Julie mango” (52), and finally “a daughter / with limb on limbs and all / the soft and sacred parts” (56). Morgan’s sparse use of metaphor strengthens her verse. Her figurative language is sharp and vivid when it does appear, such as in the following lines from “Tangled sweetgrass”:
far too long. I have ashed
like a heated cow. (5)
The collection also excels in its attention to minute details, such as those of a dying hummingbird, whose bones are “draped on ridges of bone. On her / side, she rests her breast against the shell of her wing” (17). In moments of keen
observation, Morgan elicits a deeply felt poetic sympathy. On the other hand, she relies heavily on the motifs of bones, teeth, and skin that recur throughout the collection. Although these images unify the poems, they lose some of their power through their repetition.
While Building a Nest from the Bones of My People gradually builds in intensity as a soon-to-be mother reckons with her past, the ending is strangely calm, a kind of sigh of relief. The last poems in the collection show that Stella, the newborn, will thrive despite the adversity she faces. In “This is the stillness,” the speaker “shoo[s] away jumbies, their hot mischief” but Stella has no fear of them and “laugh[s] wildly” (67). It is the defiant, jubilant child who allows the mother to find hope for what lies ahead. Morgan dives deeply into an archive of grief but brings her readers back onto solid ground on the other side. This collection is a moving read full of strange and beautiful dreams — both ones that haunt and ones that propel us forward.
— Rebecca Geleyn is a writer, editor, and instructor of English in Mohkinstsis (Calgary, Alberta).
