Close Menu
  • Home
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Links
  • MER Journal
    • Latest Issue
    • Back Issues
    • Subscribe to MER!
  • MER ONLINE
    • MER Quarterly
    • MER Literary Folios
    • Poetry
    • Fiction
    • Creative Prose
    • Essay
    • Craft
    • Interviews
    • Book Reviews
      • Bookshelf
    • Authors’ Notes
    • Art Gallery
      • Special – Hybrids
  • News & Events
    • News
    • Poem of the Month
    • Events
      • MER 18 Virtual Reading – Voices From HOME
    • Currents
      • Announcements
      • Highlights
  • Shop
    • All Issues
    • One Year Subscription
    • Two Year Subscription
  • Submit
Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram
MER – Mom Egg Review
Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram YouTube Tumblr Threads
  • Home
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Links
  • MER Journal
    • Latest Issue
    • Back Issues
    • Subscribe to MER!
  • MER ONLINE
    • MER Quarterly
    • MER Literary Folios
    • Poetry
    • Fiction
    • Creative Prose
    • Essay
    • Craft
    • Interviews
    • Book Reviews
      • Bookshelf
    • Authors’ Notes
    • Art Gallery
      • Special – Hybrids
  • News & Events
    • News
    • Poem of the Month
    • Events
      • MER 18 Virtual Reading – Voices From HOME
    • Currents
      • Announcements
      • Highlights
  • Shop
    • All Issues
    • One Year Subscription
    • Two Year Subscription
  • Submit
NEWSLETTER
MER – Mom Egg Review
You are at:Home » Visits and Other Passages by Carol Smallwood

Visits and Other Passages by Carol Smallwood

0
By Mom Egg Review on April 8, 2019 Book Reviews

Reviewed by Barbara Ellen Sorensen

Visits and Other Passages by Carol Smallwood is a collection of poems, short essays, observations and vignettes that take the reader on an intellectual, yet deeply personal odyssey. A reader of this volume quickly realizes that the author is not just a mere observer, but an active participant in a magnified life. Indeed, she mentions viewing events through the prism of a magnifying glass on several occasions. What she compels the reader to come away with is the realization that life in all its ordinariness is not mundane but fantastic and fascinating, and awful and wonderful, simultaneously. And that “the strangest thing of all was not to see how strange things really were” (6).

The book lucidly moves through sections that hold us riveted through visits from a snippy Avon lady to stories peopled with familial figures such as aunts, uncles, and cousins. Contemplative vignettes highlight thoughts on writers as diverse as Hemingway and Isak Dinisen. The delicate rendering of the ordinary is infused with the philosophy and disparate principles of these writers. Simple actions such as people-watching become linked to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tale because the gem in his tales is that there are, “people so alike and so unalike, so endlessly interesting” (13).

Though Smallwood references more writers of prose than poems, her sure poetic hand and knowledge is evident in the formal verses she pens. Her sonnets, pantoums, villanelles and tercets, triolets and rondeaus seem effortless and the rhymes move at a pace that never feels forced or contrived. The lovely cinquain, “Prufrock Napkins,” is elegant in its intertwining of crash fast-food joints with sublime T.S. Eliot images of fog and rooms and women who “come and go/talking of Michelangelo” (37).

Smallwood’s prose is brimming with poignancy and explores the ultimate loneliness of twenty-first century technology. “Will the owners of computers take over the custodianship of culture and knowledge?” she wonders (79). Libraries seem quaint now and out-of-step. “… everything changed,” she writes, “… if you just looked, you saw libraries giving way to the electronic pursued by the fear of becoming obsolete” (84). With emotional acuity, Smallwood shakes us with the hard realization that we are aging into a social anthropology dominated and controlled by youth. A young woman passes Smallwood and “she looked through me, preferring, perhaps, not to see herself sitting there when she got my age” (85).

Smallwood lifts us out of these personal observations in the fourth section of her book that delves into the beauty of the natural world and how everything is linked through the awareness and concentration of science. An invasion of butterflies, moving tectonic plates and whirling planets all pull the reader forward and out of ourselves. The fact that we are all connected is, finally, a welcomed cliché but Smallwood is not content with letting us sleep peacefully with this collective actuality. She warns, “…it is in this subterranean well that the best and worst of us lurks and I think writing is dipping into this well … sensing it best not to got too far or else we’ll never return—or if we do, are forever changed and do not belong any more” (109).

Visits and Other Passages by Carol Smallwood
Finishing Line Press, 2019, [paper] ISBN: 978-1-63534-800-2
115pp


Barbara Ellen Sorensen is former senior editor of the American Indian Science & Engineering Society’s flagship publication, Winds of Change. Sorensen is a contributing writer to the Tribal College Journal. Sorensen has had three books of poetry published: Songs from the Deep Middle Brain (Main Street Rag, 2010), Compositions of the Dead Playing Flutes (Able Muse Press, 2013), and Mary’s River (Kelsay Books, 2018). Her first book was nominated in 2011 for a Colorado Book award.

Share. Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr Email
Previous Article50/50 by Julianne Palumbo
Next Article Rewilding by January Gill O’Neil

Comments are closed.

May 13, 2025

MER Bookshelf – May 2025

May 12, 2025

Otherwise, I’m Fine: A Memoir by Barbara Presnell

May 8, 2025

Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree by Jennifer Martelli

May 8, 2025

Venus Anadyomene by Alyssa Sinclair

May 4, 2025

Seeking Spirit: A Vietnamese (non) Buddhist Memoir by Linda Trinh

May 4, 2025

Apartness by Judy Kronenfeld

May 4, 2025

Inconsolable Objects by Nancy Miller Gomez

May 4, 2025

All This Can Be True by Jen Michalski

May 4, 2025

Leafskin by Miranda Schmidt

May 1, 2025

MER Poem of the Month – May 2025

Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram YouTube Tumblr Threads
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Submit
  • Contact
MER - Mom Egg Review
PO Box 9037, Bardonia, NY 10954
Contact [email protected]

Copyright © 2025 MER and Mom Egg Review

Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.