Her Side of it

Marilyn Bushman-Carlton notices the differences, inherent or learned, between men and women, even in her own family. Take sports, for example. In "The Girls' Game," she notices how "the fathers think of soccer / as the usual battlefield," while the daughters hear "their mothers' cotton voices" and apologize. "Oh, sorry!" they tell their opponents: "No, you go ahead."

She makes an arc from the present back to her own childhood, then forward through marriage and the challenges of parenthood. She explores a woman's choices, the joys and bumps along the way. For instance, she realizes her husband would put his body "between mine and a smoking train," then asks, "Would you, My Sweet, / like Pierre de Châtelard, / write poems for your lady, be cinched / into clothes with collars big as carriage wheels?"

She writes of watching, unnoticed, her son dancing in his room, spinning in "erratic ovals." "I watch," she writes, "because I have never been a boy, fourteen, shuffling into a man, / ... I have only been a mother / ... I have been a girl / in love with a boy this age ..."

"Love is a delicate chain of moments," the poet writes. Her approach to poetry is the same as toward love, delicate and interconnected. As Kathleen Bryce Niles, past editor of the Comstock Review, writes, Bushman-Carlton is "an astute observer of human beings, particularly those closest to her," and her "poems are both honest and touching."