A “Cold River” Throughout: Joan Larkin’s near-perfect chap…

Paperback, 42 pages; Publisher, Painted Leaf Pr; 1st Edition (October 1997)

Essay by Theresa Senato Edwards, MA, MFA

Every poem is great in this chapbook, with power in each line. Even some of the most prolific poetry books have “filler poems,” poems that do not quite match up to the rest of the collection. However, Larkin’s compilation is simple, honest, and complete.

Larkin’s book explores death and grief and the places that hold these emotions. Her book’s title poem, “Cold River,” in particular, placed almost at the end of this small collection, shares the speaker’s immense grief upon losing her mother. In fact, throughout Larkin’s book, we see either mentions of a mother or entire poems about a mother. It is this repetition, this linking of mother, if you will, throughout the book that replicates the rush of power that a natural river can possess. Additionally, it is the motif of death throughout that keeps the metaphorical river in Larkin’s collection cold. Both the coldness of death and the urgency of grief merge poignantly in her title poem, as Larkin’s use of one long stanza flows effortlessly down the page.

Larkin creates that cold river current in this piece that flows through all twenty-one poems of her collection. In “Cold River” Larkin’s attention to the sounds of words is evident, as she uses internal and end rhyme. This rhyme technique that powers the words, coupled with the lack of substantial pause (because there are no stanza breaks), allows the harsh reality of grief to spill through different situations associated with a mother’s dying without disconnecting the speaker’s emotions felt throughout the poem. Larkin begins the poem with assonance within and at the end of the lines:

My mother disappeared in a shoddy

pine coffin in the rain

while my brother complained of its cheapness

and one aunt whispered

as I took my turn shoveling

in black clothes and shame. (lines 1-6)

The “a” sounds heard in “rain,” “complained,” and “shame,” move these lines along, using a long, somewhat slow assonance within the fairly quick pace of the scene. It is as if the river’s rage begins, as the characters’ emotions emanate the rushing water, and the assonance becomes the bold rocks amid the watery terrain.

And Larkin continues to use the long “a” sound in “painted,” “they,” “day,” and “legs” in these lines placed after a short explanation of the four months it takes for the speaker’s mother to die:

Suddenly the house was full

of thin, rose-painted china.

The valuable ring she’d kept

where they couldn’t steal it

felt loose on my middle finger.

The day I phoned from Shelburne,

the nurse whispered to me,

Now her legs are weeping.

Every other line resonates the “a” sound and takes readers from one memory of the speaker’s to the next without a stanza break. Again, Larkin places the familiar “a” within these lines like rocks amid that raging river flow, and I am able to maneuver through a “river” of grief by way of these sounds.

As the poem continues, it uncovers an intense, emotional connection between mother and daughter, and although Larkin’s use of assonance subsides in the remaining lines, her use of a splash of multiple rhyme (pun intended) within the long stanza carries the poem to its end. Here is where I feel that coldness of death take over. Larkin writes,

I was resting from her long dying.

Mother, I said. I’m in the cabin.

I can hear you—twice

she dragged words to the surface.

I can’t forget that voice.

It was my first. The bitter

edge I hated as I grew wild

was the only weapon of the woman

who called me Daughter.

Now it’s a current in me

like the cold river

I take grief swimming in. (lines 18-29)

Larkin’s use of “resting” and “dying” in one line begins the speaker’s final memory of her mother. And because of the close placement of this multiple rhyme, I hear its overtones amid the lines that follow, connecting to the same sound of “swimming” in the last line of the poem. As the speaker (the daughter) rests after witnessing her mother’s months of suffering “in a useless body we [she and other members of the family] fed, / lifted, tortured, four months” (“Cold River” 8-9), she comes to terms with the way in which she loved her mother and the reality of the grief of loosing her that will stay with her for the rest of her life. The lines within peel down the speaker’s connection to her mother, carrying the coldness of a mother’s death and the grief associated with it through to the last line that confirms the urgency of the speaker’s grief in the context of this poem as well as the entire manuscript.

Larkin has truly created not only a powerful poem in “Cold River” but also a fitting way in which to title her collection and wave the emotions of grief throughout the work.