Book Review: Lovely Daughter of the Shattering

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Lovely Daughter of the Shattering by Patrice Boyer Claeys, Kelsay Books, $14 paperback, 2019

Reviewed by Sury Ghosh

“I love you,” I told him as I kissed him good night. He said he loved me too, and went on to ask: “Mama, do you love me more than you love yourself?” Not knowing what the right answer is to that question, I only repeated what I said to him earlier, that I loved him, very much. As a mother of this young person, I had often found myself in situations like these, grappling for the right answer, the right words, the right way.

Parenting is probably one of, if not the biggest, contradiction of life: by being the most rewarding as well as the most fiercely challenging of all that we do. As a mother of that young person with (gradually outgrowing) special needs, I have often felt the challenges surpassing the rewards, and that to survive the times, while saving my other relationships, will be a rare feat.

That exact struggle — to strike a balance between being a loving parent and nurturing other relationships, most importantly, that one has with self — is what shows up heart-wrenchingly in the poignant poems by Patrice Boyer Claeys, in her beautiful debut collection, Lovely Daughter of the Shattering.

Claeys takes us on a mesmerizing journey of parenting a child with mental illness, describing the first love of a mother and her child at the adopting agency — “We’re in this thing like leaves, like sandwich halves. Neither of us live without the other” — through the time when the mother now witnesses her daughter becoming a teenage parent. The mother affectionately observes her teenage daughter as the latter tends to her son: “She dresses him with care, cuing the blue of his sleeper to the flecks on her acrylic nails — as if they’re off to a photo shoot instead of the sofa.”

These poems are extremely relatable to parents of all kinds, all over the world, the new and the experienced, with help or without, loving their children, putting up with all odds and wanting the very best for them, making an effort to realize every day that “Love is letting the world be half-tamed.”

It takes a lot of courage to see and accept your life’s curves and find joy in it, even more so to then write about it bravely, and with poise. Claeys’ powerful poems take the readers to visually experience, through her words, the different stages of parenting seamlessly: the predictable as well as the unexpected ones. We can see the hurt that the mother-daughter duo bears and inflicts, and the love they share, evoking an array of emotions in us.

The anthology, with a number of delightful centos, is a celebration of life, what it offers us, and how to live it with all we have — above all, how love can teach us, reach us and make us do the impossible.

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Sury Ghosh is a cell biologist, a humanist, and an avid reader and writer.