An Ever Present Love: A Review of The Breath by Cindy Savett

It is said that to lose a child is to lose the future. But just a few pages in, this collection of poems, these illuminated memories and imaginings convinced me that Cindy Savett’s daughter was not lost to her when she died at the age of eight all those years ago. As long as Rachel “… lingers, sounds out / the curvatures of my breath / with her phantom tongue…” then she is as real as ever, her all too brief existence immortalised in the souls of those who loved her. And with that love, you feel their future is assured.

The Breath is a series, an arrangement of stuttering emotion and almost mythical imagery summoning the poet’s departed child and relating her sorrow in an even and considered way which only magnifies its intensity. It is both a quiet release of anguish and a heightened recollection, skillfully composed and with an overwhelming honesty that urges you on to discover more about Rachel and her abiding presence.

A mother’s love is a mother’s love and is unfathomable, but of course the whole family carries the burden of such a devastating impact on their lives, each experiencing and coping with it in their own way. Savett gives us fleeting impressions of their responses, including the son who “… grips the whispers / around him, listens for the dead child and the stories / she once told him.” and the surviving daughter “clothed in the needles of old love.” Her husband Rob features prominently throughout; his strength and support, the unfailing and unconditional love he provides, as well as his own grief, are recorded touchingly. These four lines, from the poem “Of Rob,” are a nice illustration of just that:

Rob, iron weaver,
binds us down to the dirt,
loosens the acres
inside my breath.

As individuals, as a couple, as a household, Cindy, Rob, Alison and Sean are necessarily reconstructed by force of circumstance; their history, their very DNA adjusted to cope since Rachel’s leaving; since they:

… were a house
with sinking beams, set apart
from the many.

Within these pages, the work of a born poet, are what might be called momentary poems, poems of the here and now like entries in a diary which document Rachel’s reappearances over time, along with meditations and a kind of philosophical searching. The whole is a dignified lament and a potent, a near hypnotic insistence of the child’s continued presence. What appeals is the utter artlessness of the poetry: there is nothing contrived or mannered here; everything is natural, and the desired aim of conveying the heartache and the love is achieved purely through sincerity and candour. Every poem in the collection succeeds in doing just that. Consider the following, called “Faded, Rachel, Gone”:

When you fled
I threw out the bedclothes
and your shuddering scent, you

were the watchgirl who lay beside me
and split dawn’s light from the dark.

Me, aimless
dwarfed by your single last gasp.

There is a guileless sensitivity, an unselfconscious openness in these lines, where each word feels natural and right, serving to highlight the awful reality of the moment. That “shuddering scent” is almost unbearable.

Cindy Savett, who teaches poetry workshops in psychiatric hospitals, has previously published a full-length collection of poetry about Rachel, Child in the Road, so why another now, fourteen years later? The answer is abundantly clear in each of these manifestations of the girl’s continued reality. Rachel still breathes, still visits her mother, her father, the unfortunate siblings starting out in life with both the blessing and the pain of their sister’s memory, and Savett is eager to preserve these moments. Perhaps even obliged to do so. I can imagine that it took a good deal of thought deciding to share them with an unknowing public, but I applaud her courage in doing so; indeed, I am grateful for it.

The sweet memories, the comforting reminders and the very act of realising her daughter’s existence still, are positive and are generously sprinkled throughout, but unsurprisingly the tone is overwhelmingly that of sadness, a quiet melancholy no better expressed perhaps than in this rather piteous poem titled “Sublime”:

I track you, my endlessly dying daughter,
for the shadow in your breath, ragged prize
drawn from your mouth to mine,

and pin you shaken and pulsing
to the dirt. I stumble over
pieces of your gray iron coat

to my hour that howls,
my burying shovel twisted, my home
overrun by your hollow eyes.

This collection, without doubt the most affecting I’ve read for a very long time, is divided into what the author terms incantations, (and I can’t think of a better word to describe the ritualistic nature of the language used, the repetition, the weight attached to certain images) the last of which is but a single poem. It’s an intense summing-up of Rachel and consists of a series of epithets describing her “used-to-be-girl”, each followed by a figurative finger to the lips and a plaintive “silence”. It’s a prayer, an invocation, a quite beautiful calling out to her absent child.   

It’s not my place as a reviewer to comment directly on the personal tragedies and consolations of a poet, although it’s almost impossible in this case not to, but it is my job to evaluate the work resulting from them. Do the poems convey the reactions to those experiences in such a way as to draw the reader in, to give the reader insights, revelations of bare truth, that a more prosaic recording could not? Well, in respect of this equally powerful and tender collection, I can answer emphatically yes. Cindy Savett has let us in on her and her family’s grief, their strength, their togetherness with good grace and astonishing candour, and I believe that, as readers, we are all the better for it.