by Martha Silano | Contributing Writer
Whiteout
Jessica Goodfellow
University of Alaska Press, 2017
Jessica Goodfellowâs Whiteout eulogizes the sudden death of the authorâs uncle, Steve Taylor, whoâalong with eleven othersâset off on the morning of July 4, 1967, to summit Mount Denali. Seven of the twelve climbers did not survive, including Taylor. While Goodfellow was too young at the time of his death to remember him, the specter of her uncleâs sudden death looms heavily and silently over her. From the very first poem in the collection, âUncanticle,â (the word uncle is deftly embedded in many of her titles, including âUntraceable,â âUncleaved,â and âUncollectedâ), Goodfellowâs narrative unfolds in a manner that emphasizes the inaccessible, unresolvable aspects of her uncleâs death. Equally as integral to the work, these poems are resonant despite their revelations of inconsolable grief. In the opening poem a fox is described as it walks in the snow,
vanishing behind a rock, to reappear there, by the pine, stitching
his way across the hillside, in and out of our sight line, our knowing.
As she describes its disappearance in the âcold and barely / splintered light,â the reader is introduced to the notion that a person can be literally gone, wiped out without a trace, but that these erasures only serve, paradoxically, to make the missing person more palpably present, as real as when they were alive. As Goodfellow shares in âThe Fold,â
My family is silent
about our dead. Hardly
a word about an uncle,
a brother. We children were
to understand that meant:
he was beloved.
Silence as receptacle.
But silence canât stopper bereavement, that sense that âhis nowhere was everywhere. My mother could not lookâ (âPhantom Pantoumâ). Throughout this book, Goodfellow brings her uncle into focus through details that sharpen the experience of his loss. In âMy Mother Adds the Name of her Brother, Missing on Denali since 1967, to her Parentsâ Headstone,â she laments how âHe who never thought to migrate, only wander, / is now not only citizen but mayor of the permafrost.â
Goodfellowâs incorporation of etymologies and use of sound orchestration lend an exquisite beauty to these poems. In âEver Aftermath,â we learn âThe math of aftermath is subtractionâ / disaster, catastrophe, ruin: / loss, loss, and loss.â It turns out math derives âfrom the Old English / for mowingâwhen aftermath was a second crop // in the same land / as the first brutal harvest.â The term aftermath shifted from a reference to accretion to one of subtraction, which left Goodfellow and her siblings smack dab in the middle of their âfamilyâs silent grief,â like theyâd been âadded to the scene like sheep / set to graze in the foreground of Stonehenge.â The four alliterative sâs solidify our understanding that, similar to Stonehenge, the uncleâs disappearance is shrouded in mystery and myth. In âA Brief History of Risk,â we learn riskâs origin is less clear, âperhaps from the Greek for soldierâs / fortune, following the Arabic // of that which God allots, / stemming from Middle Persian / for daily bread. Or maybe risk / is from Italian via Latin for cliff âŠâ
Absent the facts, Goodfellow has no choice but to fill in the blanks, as in âSearch Party, Called Off,â an achingly gorgeous poem that strives to make peace with the details that will go forever missing:
In the either of ether or ice
he became not himself but his body.
He froze or he fellâin the never
of knowing, we pitch our tents.
We dwell in the hinge of weather
and whether.
Despite having so little to go on, despite knowing âheâd never leave the mountain,â Goodfellow makes a song of what she does know, one detail at a time. In âMap of the Disaster Site,â she starkly states that “his sleeping bag was sighted / but not recoveredâ and that âX marks the axeâ/ also seen but not recovered.â These are hard truths for both writer and reader, but the take-away is that by writing these poems, Goodfellow has brought her uncleâs body home. Her lines re-form the speakerâs pain into sonically-pleasurable riffs:
But in the end a map is useless,
only gravityâs graffiti and snowâs slow pentimento.
Unrepentant map, no X marks the mountainâs fontanel,
its loosely woven selvage he fell through into the legend-
less depths of the wild mind, the memory leaving usonly this permanent impermanence âŠ
I find myself coming back to these poems for repeated readings to marvel at the feat Goodfellow has pulled off. For this is a story not only about an uncle, but about all of us. As she states, in âThe Foldâ:
Chasm and scaffold,
cornice and crevasse,
the steep pitch of life
and its inverse, its obverse.
Observe, mortals:
the edge. Welcome
to our fold.
Martha Silano is the author of five poetry books, including Gravity Assist (forthcoming March 2019), The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, and Reckless Lovely, all from Saturnalia Books. She also co-authored, with Kelli Russell Agodon, The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice. Her poems have appeared in Paris Review, Poetry, and American Poetry Review, among others, and her book reviews can be found online at Kenyon Review, Boston Review, and On the Seawall. Martha teaches at Bellevue College, near her home in Seattle, WA.