“Certain Shelter,” by Abbie Kiefer, June Road Press, paperback, 79 pages

A few weeks I ago I talked to Abbie Kiefer about “Certain Shelter,” her debut collection set in central Maine. These poems address the loss of her mother as well as the forced change in Maine’s mill communities of the last century.

Jeri Theriault: Many place references in this collection are familiar to me and anyone else who grew up in central Maine. Even the cover art, Main Street at Night, Waterville, Maine, is familiar. Why did you choose this particular image?

Abbie Kiefer: I was drawn to its composition—the car coming at the viewer, headlights on. There’s motion and the idea of illumination, and it’s clearly an image of the past, which is so important to this book—how the past can be a reminder of impermanence. I’m thinking of the old Hathaway mill in Waterville which for a time housed Marden’s, where they sold office furniture and wallpaper. I used to go shopping there with my parents. You know when people worked in these old mill buildings, they probably could not imagine them being used for a different purpose because they were so integral to the community and employed so many people. People expected the mills to always exist. But seeing the buildings now, repurposed or empty, it’s clear that the things we count on can’t always last. There’s a grief in that.

JT: In your poem, “Revitalization Efforts: The Mill,” the mill has been “a scrap lot / and flea market”—like the Marden’s in the old Hathaway of your memory. Because of the series of poems titled “brief history” or “revitalization,” this idea of past and renewal is part of the book’s essential structure.

AK: The book is grappling with this idea that things change regardless of how you feel about it. But people show resilience when they continue trying to remake these places. Change is scary, but it also means survival. As for the “brief history” and “revitalization” series, I wanted an organizing principle for the book. You know, the nature of grief is you go through the worst of it and you think, OK, that’s done. And then something triggers that grief again. Writing a series of poems creates repetition and that repetition mimics the cyclicality of grief. There’s also a certain element of sheltering in a series of poems. I found that structure—that repetition—comforting for me as a writer. I thought maybe a reader would also.

JT: I like the way you braid cultural loss with personal loss. For example, “Revitalization Efforts: Levine’s Clothing” introduces a place, “Dave’s Burritos,” which used to be Levine’s Clothing Store. That old building has survived, and so have the poem’s characters, the “three daughters / now unmothered” who are taking a break from their mother’s funeral preparations.

Likewise “A Brief History of Agriculture in Aroostook County, Maine” addresses a change in the way potatoes are harvested, but it’s actually about your mom’s experience. I love the story about your mother who “stood on a potato barrel and sang” as well as the argument for the potato harvest done the old-fashioned way, the need for “hard lessons.” In this recording of everyday life and the people who live it, you are very much like Edwin Arlington Robinson, whose presence is another kind of support beam for this book.

AK: I was fascinated that Robinson was from Gardiner because that’s where my dad grew up. Famous poets were from other places—not Gardiner, Maine.

JT: “A Brief History of E. A. Robinson and the Train Station in Gardiner, Maine” is the longest poem in the book, a prose poem with six sections.

AK: Robinson left Gardiner for New York when he was 29, but he kept writing about an imagined New England village he called Tilbury. I say in the book that its residents “falter against change. Against their own failings.” When I read Robinson’s biography I felt a kinship beyond our shared geography. He lost his mother very early. And Gardiner had been a manufacturing place but even in Robinson’s time,in the early 1900s, the industry was starting to slow. But yes, the thing I love most about him is that he gives so much attention to ordinary people. The critic Irving Howe calls Robinson “A secret sharer taking snapshots” which I love because these Tilbury Town poems offer a glimpse of real life which is what I was trying to do with my brief history poems.

JT: This poem contains all the book’s themes. Another place that zeroes in on the book’s themes in a more personal way is a three-poem sequence in the book’s center. “How I Wore It,” “Self-portrait as the Safe Deposit Vault in the Vacant First Trust,” and “When My Mom Has Been Dead Two Years, the Old Bowling Alley Lot Is Still Empty” focus on the mother’s death. Here, the form of the three poems, free verse with lots of white space, is quite dramatic.

AK: The white space can function as a breath or it can be a place where the speaker is faltering in some way. “How I Wore It” is the story of the speaker’s mother’s funeral. The spaces grow as the poem goes on. At first, when the speaker is holding herself together, there are small spaces. The reader might recognize that she’s struggling.

JT: Yes, this daughter seems to be doing everything to hold herself tighter:
she
“wore a black dress”
close-
collared black heels close-
toed wore double nursing
pads wore Spanx for all the postpartum

spill hair twisted hard
so it wouldn’t come free

And not only has she just lost her mother, she’s just given birth! No wonder she’s struggling!

AK: As the poem goes on, you feel the speaker unraveling more and more as the work on the page unravels. As the gaps increase, the depth of the loss is also expanding. The next poem is thematically related because the poem’s speaker wants to be something steadfast and reliable—a safe deposit vault. For me, the white space felt like an embodiment of what the pain was like. You have an empty vault, “a two-ton slab / shut fast against trouble.”

JT: It’s startling to think of the bereaved daughter as the safe deposit vault. She says, “I promised to hold /everything.” But she ends up holding “this empty space.” Reading this poem aloud, I’m almost gasping because of the white spaces.

AK: And then in this third one, “When My Mom Has Been Dead Two Years,” well, it’s two years later and the gaps are not as frequent. You experience this grief, this loss that will be with you forever and it will become part of you, but it will even bring comfort in a way, “ground that shakes can also shelter.” And it doesn’t mean that those emotional gaps are paved over or eliminated. They’re there, but they aren’t the only thing that define you. In a fundamental way, it’s the surviving that defines you.

Jeri Theriault is the editor of WAIT: Poems from the Pandemic. She lives in South Portland.