Orange-Rose and Shadow by Jeannie Gambill – NWVS #166

At dusk, its striking colors are made even more attractive as evening shadows settle. This is apparent in Jeannie Gambill’s Orange-Rose and Shadow, dedicated to her mother and her long struggle with Alzheimer’s disease—the beauty and darkness of that “long artery of illness” borne through the “evening light of two worlds.” In the poems, we see that personality and language may be broken by the disease, yet the loved one still remains a presence whose ways of knowing have changed. And at death, she is made whole again, through the intervention of a divine potter, who cements the pieces with gold, making strong seams to emphasize the mother’s life, fully and wholly lived. Jeannie Gambill’s poems map for us a brilliant geography of living and dying, honestly portrayed through pain and brokenness that transform to wholeness in another realm.

–Rebecca A. Spears, author of Brook the Divide and The Bright Obvious

Illness is often compared to a war fought within the human body, but in Orange-Rose and Shadow, Jeannie Gambill traces the nuances of her mother’s journey with Alzheimer’s Disease with beauty, equanimity, and grace. These poems filter color as does stained glass, and we feel the depth of loss and love in all its facets.

–Robin Reagler, author of Into The The, Dear Red Airplane, and Teeth & Teeth which was selected by Natalie Diaz as winner of the Charlotte Mew Prize.

Jeannie Gambill has written a remarkable collection witnessing her mother’s journey through Alzheimer’s as an “un-naming,” a slow movement into “not knowing – / as you and I think of knowing.” I’ve never read such an accurate, expansive, moving exploration of the complicated grief that comes from losing a loved one over two decades. Like Paul Celan and Gerard Manley Hopkins, Gambill understands how difficult it can be for language to hold the entirety of our love and our sorrow. While her slow, lush descriptions make the world around us, her torqued syntax and remade words move us past the edge of experience. We enter something truly deep alongside the speaker, who inhabits all times at once: childhood and connection, loss and losing, grace and grief. Through poetry as fugue, the mother—“now moved through / to another light”—is called back, and her presence shimmers for us in the reading.

–Sasha West, author of Failure and I Bury the Body