Daughters by Brittney Corrigan
Airlie Press, 2021
Daughters is a collection of persona poems from the perspective from daughters of parents that harbor unexpected complexity. Corrigan imagines daughters of characters from fairy tales, news stories, everyday life, and more. We hear from the daughter of Dorothy, long past the yellow brick road, from the daughter of Bigfoot, from Gretel, from a death row inmate. These poems reimagine becoming a female adult from a radical shift of perspective. The poems in this collection allow the reader to examine girlhood from the point of pressure from the parents’ trauma or unique experience.
Daughters is Corrigan’s fourth book of poetry. These are well-honed poems, carefully crafted and perfectly executed. She writes with keen attention as she examines the relationship between parent and child. She shows again and again with great psychological insight how children love their parent, even if the parent is a monster. In the poem “Medusa’s Daughter,” she writes:
The worst of it was that she couldn’t look
at me. To keep me safe, to keep my limbs
from stone. She couldn’t rest her fiery, liquid
eyes upon the sapphire pebbles of my own.
My infant fingers reached into her hair, coiled
quick around the serpents’ swaying forms.
The poem concludes:
I only looked upon her while she slept, her beauty
Wild, reptilian, hidden fast. Her Gorgon skin
aglow with all the curse could not beat back,
or change, or else reverse. She loved me,
this I knew without her gaze. I saw it
mirrored: tender, careful, raised.So when he came into our cave—his shield
a blinding, golden, threatening, godlike
maw—she could not petrify, she could not save
herself, and so she cast an equine spell upon
my bones as each snake writhed and tried
to hold me close: I took wing as she fell.
Corrigan is particularly skilled at arriving at compassion and tenderness in these unexpected narratives. Like the passage above, these poems have a muscular musicality. Corrigan often uses short lines and block stanzas to tell the story of how the daughter experiences her parent. Some poems are shape poems and are visually delightful: “Cellist’s Daughter” is in the shape of a cello; “Storm Chaser’s Daughter” is an inverted triangle; and “Alligator Wrestler’s Daughter” is, yes, in the shape of an alligator.
This is a remarkable and very smart collection. I use these poems often in teaching workshops because they are emotionally rich, psychologically complex, full of surprising language, and strongly musical. My favorite poem is “Active Shooter’s Daughter,” with the epigraph: for the daughter of Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, San Bernadino, California, December, 2015. Here are the last two stanzas of this remarkable poem:
I wasn’t enough. The promise of my future.
Not enough. The safety of my world. Not enough.
The empty house, the shattered family. Neither
were enough. The road of shame before me.
The thought of me abandoned. The gaping of my life
without her. None of it. None of it enough.I wasn’t responsible. But oh sisters, oh brothers and fathers
and mothers, oh daughters and sons, oh friends and dear ones
crouched and laid flat by your fear, oh survivors, oh wounded,
oh ghosts. I wasn’t enough. I couldn’t stop them. Couldn’t
hold their hearts. So hold me. Hold me up into the mourners
and the cameras and the sun. Enough. Enough. Enough.
This is a poem that breaks my heart open every single time I read it. I often share this poem with those who feel outside poetry, and it has made more than one convert. These powerful coming-of-age persona poems do what good poetry can do: expand our understanding of what it means to be human and deepen our compassion for each other.
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Michele Bombardier is the author of What We Do, a Washington Book Award finalist. Her work can be found in JAMA, Alaska Quarterly Review, Parabola, Crab Creek Review, Whale Road Review, and many others. She is the inaugural poet laureate of Bainbridge Island and the founder of Fishplate Poetry.