Review of The Curator’s Notes by Robin Rosen Chang

THE CURATOR’S NOTES, Robin Rosen Chang. Terrapin Books, 4 Midvale Avenue, West Caldwell, NJ 07006, 2021, 100 pages, $16.00 paper, terrapinbooks.com.

Robin Rosen Chang, a widely published poet and 2021 Pushcart nominee, now has a full-length collection, The Curator’s Notes (Terrapin Books, 2021). Chang is a curator of many things: relationships, nature, art, loss. Her poems about relationships in this graceful collection focus primarily on what it means to be a mother, and Chang often employs nature imagery to explore this meaning. Throughout the collection several different mothers are evoked: her own, her grandmother, stepmother, aunt, herself, the grieving Guernica mother, and Eve—the mother of us all.

These women are complex: conflicted, loving, and both vulnerable and strong. Chang describes her mother in “My Mother Was Water” as being so turbulent. She was / water—a river, torrid, and wonders, in “Cleaning the Apartment,” if her mother even wanted her: Her arms never felt / right around my body, / my body never right in her arms. Despite how painful this thought is, at the same time Chang recognizes that mother love is neither automatic nor easy. A close observer of nature, Chang notes in “Lore” that birds sometimes push eggs from the nest. Yet she also knows, as she says in “Shore Birds,” the subtle imprint / a mother makes, like the birds’ / footprints. Chang’s work is about connection, not distance. In fact, she dedicates the collection to her mother’s memory. In the title poem she writes about her mother in her final illness, describing her mother as if she is among the specimens the curator is examining. Yet the effect is anything but academic:

And in her bed, my mother. Her bowed back, its protruding
spinous process, like the chamber of a nautilus, spirals inward
toward oblivion.

In “Riptide,” she compares her experience of watching her mother’s slow decline to that of someone seeing a swimmer diagonal to the shoreline who is calmly…retreating / from the beach.

Chang wonders what it would mean to literally have no mother and takes a leap into the mind of the first woman in “Motherless, Eve,” who didn’t bear her mother’s burden— / depression, paranoia, nervous breakdown. Free of this inheritance, her Eve is a purely positive force—the source of good, not evil. Chang exonerates her from guilt for the Fall in “Snake,” in which the serpent eyewitness puts the blame squarely on Adam and tells us Eve was the one who tended the garden and was Careful where she stepped, / she didn’t hurt a living thing. And in “The Fig Leaf,” the poet has her wonder, challenging the concept of sin itself, why / knowledge made them hide / what gave them pleasure. Chang then not only imagines life “After Eden,” but beautifully captures something universal about relationships when she writes of Eve longing for Adam to bring her just one time, a twig covered with buds that he finds / in a field behind the home where almost nothing grows.

Chang includes poems about her own relationship with her husband, all loving, but also cognizant of the tension between his affinity for foreign places and her own comfort in streets / with simple names, like Broad and Clark, as she states in “The Gothic Quarter.” The collection also contains poems about Chang’ s connection to her children. In “A Woman in the A&P Asks Me Where I Got My Baby”—a version of a question those of us with children who do not look like us often get asked—Chang responds first with angry humor, saying she found him in the International aisle between Goya and La Choy, and, finally, with a passion that echoes Wordsworth’s “clouds of glory”:

The truth is he straddled the red band
of my aurora borealis, the reddest band, above the neon greens.
He surfed the wind,
rode vaporous waves. A trail of sepia
clouds flowed behind him.

Chang does not center her work exclusively on family ties. In a particularly striking poem about a childhood incident, “Indian Creek with Neighbor Boy,” she recounts how, after the boy fell in the water and somehow blamed her for it, she, to placate him, lay in the frigid creek, / in the exact spot [he] had fallen.

The collection holds other riches: keenly observed ekphrastic poems about art ranging from the Sistine Chapel ceiling and Gaudi’s cathedral to works by Chagall and Picasso. Gorgeous descriptions of natural beauty abound, especially that of birds and the seashore, along with the awareness of its precarious state in, as she describes it in “Great Green Macaw”: this perishing world. There are further flashes of humor, such as in “Moon,” the moon pictured like it’s been smoking dope, and the momentary confusion in “Physical Exam” when the poet, concerned for her health, mixes up DNR and NPR.

Overall The Curator’s Notes is an elegant, carefully crafted collection with much to say about how we are bonded to each other, the idea of the feminine, and the natural world. Chang’s poems, like the sand pipers she writes of in “Shore Liturgy,” lift off, a pure silver cloud.