John Zheng | Valediction: Poems and Prose by Linda Parsons

Valediction: Poems and Prose by Linda Parsons.

Madville Publishing, 2023

$19.95. ISBN 978-1956440614

As everyone witnessed, 2020 was the most terrifying year that forced human beings to live in fear and isolation during the pandemic. Yet, physical isolation could not confine the creative mind of the Tennessee poet Linda Parsons. A way for her to get through the hard times was to attend an online workshop, the Covid Garden Story Project sponsored by Appalshop and the National Endowment for the Arts, which inspired her to explore a writerly expression. The fruitful results are the 15 essayettes collected in Valediction, Parsons’s recent poetry collection published by Madville Publishing. 

To Parsons, days in isolation are no match for meditation and mindful empowerment through gardening, as she says in the first essayette titled “Visitation: Necessary”: “Especially in this time of pandemic isolation, the necessity of one spade breaking ground centers me. I excavate not only my life, but also other lives before me—marbles, buttons, iron figures, bits of china—unearthed in land as crooked as my own lifeline.” Garden is an image recurring in her essayettes, where she finds a way to release emotions against pandemic isolation. However, it does not just mean beds of flowers or plants but represents life as well. In this prose piece, a hesitation about what to cut or leave ushers us into a garden in an extravagant disorder. Plants shine freely in fall with their seasonal softness: the fennel’s plumage, the red-tongued persicaria that muddles the path, the black seedheads of coneflower, and the rudbeckia for the goldfinch, all showing natural wantonness against Parsons’s rage for order. In contrast, the wantonness pierces her heart because its sharpness is palpable in the softness of light, colors, and air as the year crooks down without any hopeful consequences from pandemic isolation. 

Then, Parsons’s contemplation moves from shaping garden beds to shaping life. Garden is an island of necessity where her “orbits in and out of the perennial beds” have shaped her life for thirty years. Her associative thinking flows from the overgrown garden to the perennial beds and the excavation of life through gardening, as she says, “This path didn’t start out cockeyed, but weather and walking have made it so. As our own paths veer from what we hoped or planned—each way the right in its time.” Which reflects an awareness of the transient life that also echoes the wabi-sabi view. This philosophical understanding of the meaning of life and its transience helps her, the in-and-outness of the self, veer to peace and calmly accept whatever happens beyond imagination.

The next essayette titled “Visitation: October” is about Parsons’s “immense missing” of her stepmother who passed away three years ago but returns to her dream. This prose piece sounds also like a writing tip, as it starts with this advice, “If this were a poem, it would open with afternoon light glancing off a birthstone…. I wouldn’t use the word loneliness, I would juxtapose our loss—mine, my father’s—onto the room, so full of her passing, like October streaming in too stunned for words and the music I would shape around absence.” Because the room is full of her stepmother’s passing, Parsons associates her loss, as well as her father’s, with it to maximize the feeling of loss into a concrete immenseness to be felt and seen, and this immense missing in turn reflects a close relationship with her stepmother, an angel descending to rescue her when she was seven, “a torn daughter of in-betweenness.” 

Further, light is the main image in “Visitation: October.” In the beginning, the natural light glancing off a birthstone may suggest waning, then the stepmother suffers in the sickbed with the glow of starvation owing to her inability to swallow, and at the end, the speaker identifies with her stepmother by saying she will shed her own light, which suggests that the stepmother is not just a rescuer but also a role model who influence on the speaker’s life is immense as well. The way Parsons characterizes her stepmother reveals how she characterizes herself as a kind human, and her identification thus embodies the oneness of light from nature and human nature, like an unending shine of tenderness passing from the stepmother to the stepdaughter. Therefore, passing may carry a double meaning.

Light sparkles in other essayettes as well. In “Visitation: Rising,” Parsons says she has seen people who pass “with so much light left to bear.” In “Visitation: Hungry,” she compares the budding of the squashes with Christmas bubble lights to convey the meaning of hope, which is further echoed in “Visitation: Conjunction” in a confident voice that “the light in its sure return urges us to rebuild, repair, yes, rebirth ourselves from whatever ash we’ve become in our hard trying and doing.” In “Visitation: Light,” the last essayette in the collection, she interweaves visual images of stemmed lights and her stepmother’s near-death experience to delve into a deep contemplation: “In the fullness of dark that settles like voices we’ve nearly forgotten or never knew, we glow with the iridescence we’re meant to wear as we pass over and through the world’s lumen.” “Visitation: Light” is a beautifully crafted prose piece, a light flaring to “meet our awe.”

“Visitation: Bright” is another essayette that continues Parsons’s immense missing of her stepmother. Its focus is the impermanence of life. The rich glow of the garden before the first frost—hot pink roses, berries reddening for Christmas, and blood-tinged spirea and viburnum—is linked to the “last hurrah before the ghostly breath passes over.” This linkage suggests that beauty exists in its impermanence. Parsons then associates this natural phenomenon of impermanence with people who are dying in “a sudden animation and presence called terminal lucidity.” Then, she offers a surprise twist to set up a contrast with an example of witnessing her stepmother’s passing. Unlike the dying beauty of flowers or those who experience a brief surge of terminal lucidity, her tethered stepmother fought to the end of her life with whooshing bellows. Her death provokes thinking about the true matter in life—kindness and gratitude—needed in service and care “for the lives that have touched ours, present and passing” as well as in our appreciation of natural beauty, concluded at the end of the essayette: 

Today I walked through the beds and laid my hands on the forest pansy redbud, mottled myrtles, beautyberry and rosehips, the paperbark maple’s peeling scrolls. Each wrote its name on my path. I thanked and blessed them for their bright living, even as we go forth to die.

Parsons’s point is that kindness and gratitude matter dearly in our lives. People with these virtues can influence others. Her hope about life and nature prevails line to line like a bright light. 

While “Visitation: Bright” brings us a thoughtful and serious moment about human kindness, the next essayette titled “Visitation: Winged” offers a humorous moment of gladness. It begins with a statement—“The birds were more aggressive this spring and summer of isolation”—which immediately raises a question in the reader’s mind. Yet, Parsons is good at using suspense to maintain our curiosity. Instead of explaining why birds are more aggressive, she gives a vivid and humorous account of her encounters with mockingbirds in her yard and uses it to explain that the winged aggression is “merely protecting bald babies in the many nests”:

I time my weeding and trimming to their hunting hours, gauging whether the coast is clear from the back door. Sometimes I miscalculate. Huff, at my bead. Huff, at my back and shoulder. I scold and shoo. I use an umbrella, no good for two-handed weeding but fine for taking out the trash. I borrow my granddaughter’s bike helmet to mow.

It’s magic that Parsons adds one more touch to her humorous description. Even when the babies fledge and the parent birds quiet, she still looks up at the sky by instinct for the winged threats and covers her head while working in the garden of leeks and brandywines. After this funny episode, Parsons returns to what is stated in the beginning. She relates seriously her instinct to protect the self to the “global period of alertness, wariness, and shrinking from other human contact during the pandemic,” which “has imprinted on our consciousness.” Since pandemic fear has been rooted in our minds, she confesses that it will take some years before human beings reestablish confidence and mutual trust and extend their hands to each other.

The joy of reading Valediction, especially the essayettes in it, is an aesthetic experience. Each visitation of the 15 essayettes presents an insightful moment of seeing and thinking and shows Parsons’s discovery of using words for her creative expression about human coexistence with the virus in the pandemic isolation. In “Visitation: Hungry,” Parsons gives a magic account of her garden coming back to life in spring. Surprisingly, the moldy decorative squashes thrown away into the flower beds begin to sprout vines. Life should have the light of hope. 

Parsons’s tone sounds biblical, and this tone threads through Valediction, an insightful collection of musings on life observed with the mind’s eye. Parsons is wise to associate her mindfulness with her garden, the one full of necessity, colors, natural wantonness, and light with the softening and sharpening of nature. What she has hungered for is “spring’s green touch” (as she says in “Visitation: Figs”), which is the human contact that’s much in need in the garden of human lives. 

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Copyright 2024 John Zheng

John Zheng’s book reviews have appeared in African American Review, Arkansas Review, Louisiana Literature, and North of Oxford. His recent poetry book is The Dog Years of Reeducation (Madville Publishing, 2023).