Heads for the Gate
Merrill Oliver Douglas
ISBN: 978-1878851260
Silverfish Review Press (October 2024)
79 pages, $20, Paper
Winner of the 2022
Gerald Cable Book Award
Reviewed by Mary Beth Hines
In her debut, award-winning collection, Persephone Heads for the Gate, Merrill Oliver Douglas spins a world saturated with color, taste, and touch. The opening poem, “So Much,” sets the stage as the speaker contemplates sun warming “men curled on park benches,” and rippling across New York City scenes that include “candy apple double decker tourist buses” as well as cops with rifles and teen girls taking selfies at the World Trade Center—
…girls born too late to glimpse
ghosts that forever pinwheel
over that tower’s shoulder… (p. 11)
Firmly situated in our disorienting political and cultural moment, this poem, like others in the book, captures the paradoxical feelings prompted by ordinary events.
…—when all that sun
rains down, I ride home
drenched in such power,
backbone, rib cage,
veins all abuzz, it’s impossible
to say if this is pleasure
or burn… (p.12)
The collection is divided into three sections. From the first, Douglas reveals herself a master of time-travel and craft. With impressive compression, she evokes feeling, portrays character, and takes philosophical leaps. The opening stanzas of “Thirst” introduce the speaker’s elderly aunt, then leap back in time via photos of her taken near various bodies of water.
Isn’t she always the same age, impatient
to sink her teeth in the next ripe plum,
keen to let go the rope swing and drop
into any river, no matter how cold? (p. 36)
From there, the poem explores the universal human experience of being an enduring consciousness housed in a changing, decaying body.
Section II continues in this vein, offering shifting perspectives on home, body, and personhood. So much is off-kilter in these that it feels:
…like when a diagnosis smacks
all sense of future from your hands, and you stand blinking
at your palm lines, bits of glass, small cuts, curled fingers. (Where I Live, p. 41)
Douglas’s speakers scrutinize both themselves and the world around them. One, observing a neighbor through a window, ponders:
What would he think if he saw me drop
him, red plaid bathrobe and all
in this poem? I put people in poems
all the time but can’t picture myself
a quick blue sketch
in another person’s morning…. (As If We Could Step Through Someone Else’s Dream, p. 51)
The final section focuses on a woman as daughter, sister, mother, wife, and elder. In “Persephone Heads for the Gate,” readers travel between Greek myth, an airport, and the speaker’s present situation as wife and daughter:
On one side, my husband, who climbs on top
each night, then snores in my ear…
On the other side, Mother, table piled
with olives, figs, those loaves she wakes
before dawn to knead…
Evenings, we sit in her bed and watch
Jeopardy, two stone goddesses
blurting out all the wrong questions… (p. 57)
In closing, I offer a favorite moment in this uplifting, imaginative collection:
…. isn’t it fine
how a sip of whiskey
can fix its hooks under my arms
and hoist me an inch or two
above the kitchen vinyl? (High, p. 62)
It is indeed fine, and I’m grateful that Douglas’s poetry does the same. We can all use such a lift from time-to-time.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 27, Issue 2.
Mary Beth Hines writes poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction from her home in Massachusetts. Her debut poetry collection, Winter at a Summer House, was recently published by Kelsay Books. Her work appears in Crab Orchard Review, Hole In The Head Review, The MacGuffin, Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso, and elsewhere. Her short fiction was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Merrill Oliver Douglas’s first full length collection, Persephone Heads for the Gate, won the 2022 Gerald Cable Book Award from Silverfish Review Press. She is also the author of the poetry chapbook Parking Meters into Mermaids (Finishing Line Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Baltimore Review, Barrow Street, Tar River Poetry, Stone Canoe, SWWIM Every Day, Verse Daily, and Whale Road Review, among others. She lives near Binghamton, New York.
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