Review of To Drink from a Wider Bowl by Joanne Durham

TO DRINK FROM A WIDER BOWL, Joanne Durham. Evening Street Press, 2881 Wright Street, Sacramento, CA 95821, 2022, 68 pages, $15 paper, www.eveningstreetpress.com.

It’s inevitable to reflect on our lives as we cross from decade to decade. In some cases, the past is indeed not past; recent incursions on women’s rights remind us of the continuing importance of speaking out. Readers who are baby boomers will recognize the social backgrounds shaping the poetry of Joanne Durham in To Drink from a Wider Bowl, winner of the 2021 Sinclair Poetry Prize. In forty-eight poems, Durham traces a woman’s observations in childhood, courtship, parenthood, and finally grandparenthood, with poems that tally the costs of sexism and silencing against the pleasures and opportunities life can offer. Reading this book from beginning to end is a satisfying experience due to Durham’s deft blend of memories and musical language—and the fact that these narrators are frank, funny, and spunky.

Durham shapes the book by linking topics and emotions from one piece to the next. Early poems reflect on older relatives as a child observes how women’s capabilities are brushed off or attract scorn. In “Crazy Eights,” the speaker states she knows little about her grandmother’s difficult past except that she was forced / out of the tobacco business she and her husband / started—not smart enough, her brothers said— / who never smiled or pinched my cheeks / but played a mean game of crazy eights. The grandmother’s talent at card-playing, hidden behind life’s compromises and limitations, are echoed in “My Mother’s Kitchen,” where the speaker discovers an uncle’s notation that her mother was the family’s “smart one” although she ended up without higher education:

I’m sitting again at her kitchen table
that morning she mused about the gifted class
she loved in second grade, but they moved
for the third time and anyway, she tells me,
she was just a little girl. Then she folds her yellow
flowered apron and steps aside, as she
always did, to let everyone else’s life
parade along the crowded pavement,
while she smiled and waved and cheered us on.

The voice in these poems offers pointed reminders about how our culture has limited, or actively denigrated, women. Here the child’s point of view offers understanding that may, in a way, help address such wrongs.

Astute child-figures reappear in poems about teaching, in which adult voices appreciate what youngsters’ imagination can show us. As “Learning” muses: children’s minds tilt / on their own axes… I ponder / if we could learn / to live this way… / together making / a brilliant, focused energy. Curiosity is a key repeatedly struck, as in “Maps,” an exhortation for all readers: Trace your finger across continents / not your own…. / Be curious about who lives there… / Hope to meet them, / fellow earth-dwellers, / all calling this planet / home. Those who wonder seem better able to appreciate their own minds and the world’s possibilities. And, in a few poems, the willful dismissal of children who have learning challenges galls Durham’s personae, as do the sexist biases shown earlier in the book.

Durham also explores family relationships, as when events or choices threaten marital harmony.  “Traction” signals how lives might be upended, when a spouse’s fast driving in rain nearly causes a couple to crash: I ask him to slow down, but his foot is heavy on the pedal / and my words are weightless. Then we spin a 360… and the next few lines sketch their lucky escape as they bounce off an unseen barrier. Afterward, the speaker reflects,

I know this night’s going to lift us awhile,
above who won’t listen, who’s too quick to judge.
When we lost traction, when there was nothing
to guide us but the white flash of instinct,
all we wanted was to make it or not, together.

Durham’s genius lies in taking the poem’s ideas past gratefulness at being spared and toward shared awareness about what truly matters in an unpredictable world.

But losses happen, of course; the book includes several elegies. The speaker’s father diminishes in his hospital room; a dying friend makes a last phone call; her mother refuses to write in a journal with flowered cover, a present from the speaker. Such sadness is both acknowledged and modulated. As the books’ characters grow older, there is new joy in the arrival of a grandchild. One whimsical piece, “Buying a Globe for My Grandson During the Pandemic,” ponders the vicissitudes of purchasing a globe online, reading the complaints from other customers—a nice stand-in for the fact that our lives will never be ideal—and decides, I’m not giving up the search / for a perfect world for my grandson.

Throughout, these poems model how one can learn to understand people with different viewpoints. Durham speaks on behalf of individuals put down by a smug, undiscerning social system; she traces how the aware child found in earlier poems has become an empathetic adult. Her speakers watch and assess, and we readers benefit from the poems’ brief but profound lessons.

Durham’s gift to the reader is a set of believable characters who pay attention to the textures of daily life and who stand up for themselves. These plain-spoken reflections ask readers to honor the empathy that make us a family, a society, a world. But make no mistake: the poems’ insights are often hard-won. Durham reminds women of today that the best way to nurture ourselves is to take delight in life while remaining resilient to its challenges.