On Keeping Things Small By Marilyn Bushman-Carlton Signature Books, 1995. Softcover: 60 pages. ISBN: 1-56085-080-9 Suggested retail price: $10.95 (US) Audience: Adults, especially LDS women; young adults
Reviewed by: Michael R. Collings

on keeping things small (to reproduce the lower-case type from the cover and the title-page) does what it says: it keeps things small. In the space of single-page poems, many of them only a dozen or so lines of free verse -- with an occasional flirtation with rhyme and meter for a stanza or so -- Bushman-Carlton skillfully elicits worlds of meaning. Her poetic voice looks backward to parents now aging and infirm and forward to children just breaking away from family, and in a line or two, a precise image, an unexpected twist of phrasing, she encapsulates a specific time, a place, a feeling.

The poem that gives the collection its name demonstrates her ability to use image and metaphor and say in a small compass what it would take far more space to paraphrase. A poem about planting a terrarrium, "on keeping things small" talkes about the meticulous care required to place "two-inch / sprig[s] of green / (one red for variety)" just so and make the terrarium -- or the poem -- work:

it takes work
to make plants think they thrive,
to make them lace and perk
a constant sprinkling
to hide telltale wilting

The strongest poems in the collection conflate nostalgic reminiscence with the edge, the tension of reality. In "My Daughter Calls," most of the poem is discursive, describing a mother's response to a daughter's telephone call from Washington D.C., where the child is away from home and ill on "the second day of her new job." The poem works well in evoking the breadth of emotion -- but only at the end does the depth of the experience unfold:

When she was young
oblivious to dangers
of traffic, glass doors,
when colors in odd bottles enticed her tongue,
I longed for the safety of her maturity,
somehow forgetting
that her body would curve
into the vulnerable mark of a woman.

The final phrase defines a strong current throughout the poems -- the responses of a strong, feeling, intelligent woman to her life and her world. Some of the poems carry more than a touch of feminism, as in "The Pulpit," which struggles to find something of the feminine in the masculine symbols and realities of the pulpit. But Bushman-Carlton does not allow her poems to speak in a single voice. There are also poems about sons growing up; about music changing lives in time and in imagination; about the simple fears and joys of watching children trying to become themselves; about lives lived in rural landscapes that carry a distinctive LDS touch; about lives facing new worlds and new temptations and new changes, many of which are equally LDS in tone and feeling.

on keeping things small is not a powerful book of poetry -- but then, it does not set out to be so. It chooses to remain small (a choice reflected in the cover art) . . . but it is nevertheless careful, and sure, and deft, and precise. It is well worth the cover price, and the range of poetry should appeal to an equally wide range of readers.

Michael R. Collings