If Mother Braids a Waterfall
by Dayna Patterson
Book Review by Rebecca Beardsall
If Mother Braids a Waterfall, an intimate, beautiful crafted poetry collection, invites the reader to explore familial threads, religion, and redemptive release.
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Dayna Patterson’s book of poetry If Mother Braids a Waterfall brings together the struggles and pleasures of post-Mormon life.
This beautiful collection starts with “The Mormons Are Coming” (p. 3-6). Reminiscent of the helping hand of a tight-knit community, the source of nourishment spiritually and literally:
Mormons bring a handmade wreath of white mesh, silver
ribbon, tinsel sprigs. A cheese-and-potato casserole. An
offering of white lilies. (1-3)
But also with the reminder that this once nurturing community can transform the moment one transition out:
Mormons send priesthood holders. Mormons send sister
teachers. Mormons send missionaries.
And when I ask them to stop, they send a card every month.
A card with no return address. (88-91)
Throughout Patterson writes back to her past via poems in letter form. Poems titled “Dear Ellen,” “Dear Susannah,” “Dear Mom,” “Dear May,” “Dear Charles,” “Dear Grandma” Epistles, really, which seems fitting considering the overarching theme of Mormonism and ancestors. “Dear Ellen, 1863” (p. 22) contains power, strength, and a hint of sorrow in its ending: “Dear Ancestress, Matriarch,/ Root: I want to taste your song, to hear your salt” (18-19).
Pattherson provides power to the female speaker to react in rage. “Dear Grandpa,” (p.21) speaks to the power men often claim over others and how men feel they have access to and freedom to dominate female bodies. Then how age and time sometimes provide the space for a voice or, in this case, a physical assault in return: “Then one day, grown to a teen,/before you had the chance I grabbed your face and pinched/hard as I could, a laugh on my lips, a decade’s bruises to avenge” (8-10). Many women have stories similar to this; it resonates on so many levels.
In “Former Mormons Catechize Their Kids,” the reader delights in the revisions and the breadth of the spiritual, mythological versions. Then Patterson hit us, a few poems later, with “Revision,” – where she wrestles with the lessons she learned as a child, under the direction of her mother, and how her mother’s coming out rocked that world – tore it down even.
A ten-year secret,
a whole decade to revise,
to re-see with new eyes.
You say you were afraid
to let me down again.
You were right then –
thirty years of Sunday lessons learned,
rules for heaven, hell,
made me a person you couldn’t tell. (14-22)
The last poem of the collection, “Still Mormon” (p. 107-112), reminds the reader of the way our histories remain, “I’m Mormon the way stars – rubbed out at noon,/robbed by sun – still burn” (1.1-2). The speaker’s I’m Mormon refrain continues throughout:
I’m Mormon the way a swimmer caught in riptide and carried out
makes peace with blue death but wears a thin suit
of hope that her body will be transmuted into
something lovely and holy: sea star, anemone, tiger shark (10.1-3; 11.1)
Historical, ancestral, spiritual echoes haunt the pages of If Mother Braids a Waterfall, an eloquent and impassioned poetry collection.
Rebecca Beardsall (MA, Lehigh University; MFA, Western Washington University) is the author of My Place in the Spiral. Find her at: rebeccabeardsall.com