Oleander Marriage
Eleanor Lerman’s poignant poetry collection reflects on the forces of nostalgia, love, loss, and grief that shape personal and communal history.
Oleander, a flowering shrub known for its stunning beauty and dangerous toxicity, is representative of the place of contradictions that these poems speak from. They honor both the wonder and pain of human experiences: “over and over you and me, still brides, / still skeletons.” Here, as in the rest of the collection, light and darkness coexist, not battling but complementing one another through reflections on the paradoxical natures of relationships and memory.
Split into two sections, the poems detail experiences with divorce, grief, and solitude. Poems set in the present employ sparse and raw language to convey the heartbreak of separation and the complexities of living in an aging body and confronting one’s mortality. Others, set in various other stages of life, evoke the naïveté of childhood and the vitality and precariousness of adolescence in the 1960s and 1970s. Writing across time and space, the book conveys not only experience itself but the processes of memory and nostalgia through which the past comes to inform the present.
“The golden days march on and on, / beautiful and blind, with nothing / to say to any of us,” Lerman writes. People may choose to linger in memory and reinvigorate both private and shared history, these poems suggest, but they cannot stop time.
Reviewed by
Bella Moses
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