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Handful of Stallions at Twilight

Book review by by McKenzie Lynn Tozan

Every time I step into the work of Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas, I feel like it is a blessing, though I know the poet, the narrator, and the poems inside are too humble to admit as much. Rather than point to her own deftness, her own ferocity in the face of the craft, Stevenson Grellas will invite you in for a cup of coffee or tea, biscuits, teach you how to fall in love with Robert Bly, and reminisce about a life lived. She’ll be that friend, too, who will ask about your day, and mean it, and she won’t shy away from the harder subjects of loss, prolonged grief, and even illness and suicide. These poems are gentle and kind but never shy, and while it’s figurative, the coffee is strong enough to carry us through, always hot, still steaming in our hands.

Stevenson Grellas is a frequent, welcome visitor to the subjects of memory, family, and loss, but these tough topics never go stale, predictable, or complacent when in her hands. Rather, her latest collection, Handful of Stallions at Twilight, leans unapologetically into the fragility of life and its suddenness. Just two pages into the collection, “Before Tomorrow Came” (2) offers the metaphor of being thrown a curveball, and I think this collection largely hinges on that premise: the concept of being thrown a curveball, navigating sudden change, missing what once was, and never even knowing when that curveball might come. Many poems here gesture to the suddenness of loss, like the narrator and her mother planning for a wedding in “August Bride,” everything beautifully and perfectly arranged, “and then she died” (83), leaving the narrator in a whirlwind, trying to reconcile after-wedding bliss with gut-wrenching, soul-skewing grief. Many poems, too, follow the trail of grieving something or someone who was lost too soon, too suddenly, too sadly—a beloved pet, a child, a literary editor, a father, and of course, a mother.

In “The Haunting” the narrator confesses: “Someone once asked if all my poems were about my mother. / Yes, I said as if there was a way to write without her / showing up, as guilt, as love, as tenderness” (56), and I believe this is the second of three hinges in the door of this work: the poet’s call to her mother, the perception of her mother through memory, and even Mother Earth. The mother is painted imperfectly, as every mother understandably should be, with her mistakes, her stubbornness, her nuances, but the collection resoundingly follows a narrator seeking her mother through the echoes in her life in which her mother still resides: a facial expression or turn of a hand that resembles her, an object that was once hers, a reflection that could just as easily be her as it is the narrator. And heart-wrenchingly, the direct foil for the search of mother is the finding of father, the sneaking reminders throughout these poems of a young narrator’s discovery and the lingering imprint of what that discovery was, what it meant for the family, how it was left unspoken, a “family secret / we were too ashamed to share” (44). Like the fond memories of the narrator’s mother, there are endearing ones for a father who could not cope, particularly the saving of innocent animals and gently carrying them back home in “Abandoned” (81-82) in a way he could not be.

Because, despite the dark corners of these poems, Stevenson Grellas never forgets to highlight the fragile beauty and the little glimmers of hope, found in and around the lost things. Life still has beauty and wonder despite grief—perhaps even more so because of it. Refreshingly, these glimmers can be found in the smallest of things: a sweater, a joke, a dress, a stunning bird, and flowers (so many flowers). I found myself frequently thinking back to Vanessa Diffenbaugh’s The Language of Flowers while reading this collection, due to Stevenson Grellas’ impressive vernacular and gesturing to such a range of species, and it made me think of the variety of messages these flowers carried—the chrysanthemums, petunias, and more—not to mention the memories tied to them through the gifting and planting of them.

There’s a gentle reminder, too (the third hinge in the door), of the importance of giving back to each other and to our planet: giving back to the bees, the birds, our loved ones, Mother Earth. In “If My Death Could Be a Whale Fall” (2), “Imagine” (8), and “In the Line at Starbucks” (11), and in many more—though particularly these three poems—Stevenson Grellas addresses the importance not only of giving back but creating a sense of legacy. “If My Death Could Be a Whale Fall” imagines a world where the narrator’s body would sink like a whale to the lower throes of the ocean, creating an offering to the bottom feeders, while the narrator in “Imagine” pictures herself as an old woman, feeding the birds, and her memory and hope living on in their feathers (pun intended, thanks to Sylvia Plath). Finally, “In the Line at Starbucks” captures that sweet moment of our days simply made better by a covered cup of coffee and paying it forward to the next person in line. Though there is grief and loss in this collection, it’s a call, a bird song, a wind chime, and even whale song to look at life as a blessing, to see beauty in the daily things, and to be kinder to each other—and it’s a call we can all hear if we’re willing to listen.

With beautiful echoes of Sylvia Plath, Robert Creeley, Michael Burkard, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, and of course, Robert Bly, Handful of Stallions at Twilight gently and truthfully navigates heartache and loss but equally challenges the reader to go into the beyond where hope resides. No matter how much she might encourage us to look back over our shoulder, Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas always eventually takes us to that place beyond.