The Pear Tree by Bethany Reid

Love of family, love of land, love of words. Bethany Reid’s latest book, The Pear Tree: elegy for a farm, won the Sally Albiso award with Moon Path Press. It is a beautiful paperback book, with cover art The Beekeeper’s House by Edmonds, WA, artist Michelle Bear. 

Reid chronicles stories of her life on a farm in Southwest Washington and the three generations of her family who lived there. The house we grew up in was large, multi- / syllabic. It babbled and raved / in more than one language.  (“A Haunted House”).She weaves the everyday and the eternal with keen observation, insight, and unmatched word craft. The many-layered poems yield new treasures with each reading.

The youngest of eleven children, Reid has written all her life. As a child she hid pencils and paper in a nook under the eaves,[of the barn], stealing time from farm chores to write. Returning to the house She slips back into her old skin, / freckled, small.(“A Pee Chee of Lined Paper”).

Raised in a Pentecostal church, she borrows Biblical themes, sometimes nostalgically, as in “Trespass:”

Nature was God’s other book
and we memorized it,
fervent as acolytes.
We knew the power and the glory of running barefoot, sunburned…. 

In “Tribulation,” the fearful stories of the Apocalypse are diffused with humor:

We were raised on Revelations, the preacher 
every Sunday morning promising hell-fire
and damnation. When the four horsemen 
of the Apocalypse came riding into our barnyard 
they’d seem ordinary as our rowdy uncles 
jamming on Grandma’s upright piano,    
And the Whore of Babylon, only our great aunt, 
Her hugs made of cigarettes and beer.

Nature was God’s other book and we memorized it.

I read and reread the poems in The Pear Tree: elegy for a farm for their musicality, for their rhythm, for the feel of them in my mouth, as in above the barn, your uncle’s gamecocks /  strut, feathers of magenta, / turquoise, cerise, halcyon blue— / cocks strolling, cockadoodling as they stretch / razored talons. (“The Cow Who Dreamed of the Moon”).

And from “A Keeper of Knots Undone:”

Ancient, artful, herringbone stitch,
hitched, fetched, hands
twined, twice-laid, matted, mated,
kinks kinked, rigging untrimmed.

The roles of three generations of women in Reid’s family and her relationship to each of them are layered throughout the poems. We see not only the constant work of raising children and keeping house, but the tender care her aunts show for their dying grandmother, and later Reid’s thoughts and feelings of her own mother’s decline. As she describes in “The Last Time I Heard Her Play the Piano,” my mother lifted her hands to the keys and it was / as if her dementia had been called out of the room.

I cannot end this review without telling you of a great resource for lovers or readers or writers of poetry—Bethany Reid’s blog at www.bethanyreid.com. It is a trove of poets to read, honest sharing about her writing life, and encouragement for other writers of any genre.

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Colleen Hull Gray is a transplanted Canadian living in the Montana Rocky Mountains in the United States. The daughter of Ukrainian immigrants to Canada, she writes about life, love, and the realities of being an immigrant in America. You can read about her grandmother, “My Baba, Myself,” in the February 2023 issue of The Bangalore Review.