An Intimacy with Loss in Patrice Boyer Claeys’s The Machinery of Grace
by Gail Goepfert
On the surface, Patrice Boyer Claeys’s book, The Machinery of Grace, is a narrative of losing a mother, first to mental decline, and then to death. We may think that it’s a common story—the loss of a parent, but it is also more. What accompanies that loss is a predictable measure of buoyancy in the present, evocations of the past, and the necessary movement into a faceless future.
Claeys’s early poems acknowledge the hold of one’s roots as a part of “this life, this life, this life.” Yes, “We have risen / from roots / born to age and die,” as the narrator asserts in the opening poem, “This Life,” yet she, and maybe we, cannot escape the “sashes of grief whipping [our] back” in her poem “Like someone lost in a forest.” We follow the memories of her mother’s saved recipes and childhood streets, the speaker’s bedside vigil, and the placing of the mother’s ashes in Lake Winnipesaukee. Each part of the journey feels simultaneously familiar and singularly intimate.
We shift time with the narrator through the poems in the book’s middle section—imagining her mother as bride and recalling a scene at the family table. We see the mother “lifting a pot / with a warm brick of chocolate surrendering to simmered milk,” hear the echo of “wake up wake up,” and witness the “ironing [that] hangs dejectedly over the chair / and the radio station of choice [that] adores Perry Como’s croon.” The movement in this book is flawless. We are steeped in details of the past that unleash pain, impart comfort, and prompt insight.
Two of the strongest poems of the book face each other in the center—one in the voice of an infant child and one that gives the mother a say. The first “My Infant Self Gives My Mother a Gift,” envisions the act of the daughter’s birth, in this case, the narrator, and suggests the child herself is the antidote for the mother’s loneliness. The speaker’s birth is a remarkable gift that she suggests doubles the mother’s “being”:
My own skin
talked to her, that song
of a newborn.
Mother,
proceed boldly
You are the center.
Now there are two of you.
In the persona poem on the facing page, “If My Mother Had Spoken of Her Childhood,” Claeys allows her mother to speak of “her sorrow and pleasure equally manifest”—from her only-childness and the loss of her own mother to the surprise of new life through her children, “sneakers and T-shirts playing / Find me! /in a field that always fills with fireflies.” Finally, the mother’s affirmation: “In my life I have done one good thing. / Given life.” The intensity in these two poems derives from the way voice is allowed to burble up—revealing a profound empathy for the mother’s needs and failings.
Poems that follow wrestle with the narrator’s own moments of wishing-her-childhood-had-been-otherwise: “Mother / I hope in the next life there’s none of this stuff,” words prompted by the constancy of a child’s morning chores because, “There are so many things to miss / while doing dishes.” She allows that her mother must have been “wanting to be sure / she would teach us to be the mother” in “Of the Hand that Made Me.” Claeys’s layers of truth expose the complexities of the mother-daughter relationship, and, as we all must, the speaker sorts through both her grief and melancholy—fearing that “It is my own song that has flown,” and chiding herself, “If I’m not happy, it must be my own fault.” These poems assure us that there are no emotional boundaries in our responses to grief and loss, and there’s no time limit on their sway.
For the narrator, the last chapter, the final poem, is unwritten, but in the final section of The Machinery of Grace, she grapples with finding that place of acceptance. Or simply with settling into a life revised after significant loss; she grants entrance even to joy. There’s a reawakening of “desire, desire, desire” in “Jazzed,” a welcoming of being “ruched in [his] arms / with the heat of [his] body” in “Plenty,” and gratitude for her sister in “To My Sister, One Year After Placing My Mother’s Ashes in the Lake”: “I lie awake and weigh the heft of grace.” Eventually, in “Renewal,” there is new breathing space— “It is spring and I am capable of anything.”
The marvel of Claeys’s narrative is two-fold. First, it replicates the multitude of emotions that accompany losing. In the time of Covid and of the unrest with long-standing racism that leads to so many senseless deaths, the book’s story parallels her personal but conceivable experience of death and loss with the piling on of our current sense of collective loss. Even more remarkably, Claeys uses only the cento form in the unspooling of this narrative, a process that requires the garnering of hundreds of lines from many poets and using only those lines, those voices, to form each poem into an authentic whole. It is a complicated and arduous method of writing collage. Claeys is an expert—the narrative is seamless. The collaboration of voices and the craft of the poet render a book of resilience and hope—“a reminder that this is the one world / which is everyone, everywhere, always.”
Gail Goepfert, associate editor at RHINO Poetry, is a Midwest poet and photographer and teacher. She has three book publications—A Mind on Pain (Finishing Line Press 2015), Tapping Roots (Kelsay Books 2018), and Get Up, Said the World (Červená Barva Press 2020). Recent publications include One Art, The Night Heron Barks, and Inflectionist Review. She loves trying new creative things—currently visual poetry and collaborative writing. More at gailgoepfert.com.