I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom

In confiding, conversational poems full of homey detail, Dower (Sunbathing on Tyrone Power’s Grave) plunges deep into motherhood, limning her relationship with her own mother and how it has shaped her life. “I’ve got a closet filled/ with dresses I need to show you,” she says wistfully, but she’s never sentimental in her portrayal of their past together or of the world around her. Her mother was a different sort of mother—“City mothers, we know about bus routes,/ …people on the eighth floor”—and her mother’s assertiveness and many disappointments create a restless undercurrent beneath the controlled surface of the poetry. But Dower remains tender as she relates facing her mother’s dementia, and gently wry when capturing the arc of “bringing up children, watching them grow.” And she doesn’t dwell solely on domestic exigencies, wanting to know what we will make of our lives and leave behind: “It’s the wholeness [of a sardine] that excites me:/ …I want to taste the murky world/ beyond my future.”