Home

Paul Scott Stanfield reviews Sally Keith’s fifth collection of poetry.

Sally Keith, Two of Everything (Milkweed Editions, 2024), 110pp.

The title of Sally Keith’s fifth collection of poetry may refer, among other things, to the book’s many dualities, generally of the “both/and” rather than the “either/or” kind: “Night does and does not really speak,” for example, or “I will and will not remember the video, just as I do and do not remember the moments the film has caught […].” The king-size bed Keith and her partner have ordered is “soft but firm but soft,” and when she is called for jury duty she senses that “when I said ‘no,’ they heard ‘yes’; my ’yes’ might also mean ‘no.’” That Keith and her partner are in the process of adopting a child creates the collection’s central duality: becoming a parent is about as old and familiar a story as there is; however, Keith and her partner are a same-sex couple, so the territory they are entering is mapless and without well-marked paths. Their story is, at the same time, archetypal and a whole new thing.

Two of Everything is a little like an adoption memoir from which the exposition and conventional narrative devices have been filleted out. It is lean, elliptical, indirect.

It’s after a sonogram and we are looking for jeans in one of those lower-level, knock-off department store shops where you can have the dumb pleasure of a cheap pair of fancy socks. Days later, a doctor calls with results. I am in the gym, up in the padded loft people use for sit-ups. By the time I understand, I have already sensed the dead end, even predicted it, and as if to make the doctor feel better, I say “thank you,” quickly adding “I’ll stop.” The doctor commends my wisdom and hangs up.

In an adoption memoir, this episode might expand into a whole chapter, perhaps two; we would learn more about the sonogram than we do about the department store or the gym, and we would know what Keith is promising to stop. The suppression of explanatory narrative and the salience of the settings’ details in Keith’s prose poem, I would argue, are precisely what create its particular verisimilitude and immediacy. Rather than an explanation of why Keith and her partner are pursuing adoption, we get the reality of receiving a life-altering phone call while in the middle of a sit-up. Even without knowing what the sonogram revealed, we feel how the moment landed.

Similar poetic effects of compression and elision make themselves felt throughout the book, as does the effect Keith achieves by referring to her partner as Amor, “Love” in Latin and Spanish. When Keith writes, “I want Amor to promise me that everything will be all right,” she seems to be seeking reassurance from both her partner and from Love itself—although neither, of course, can offer any guarantees: “But she won’t.” Since “to moor” can mean to fasten or attach, the chosen name has an additional resonance:

Amor
A moor

A harbor
A shelter

A home
A house

With the same verbal economy, Keith onomatopoetically renders every encounter with an uncomprehending world—one that would rather not imagine a same-sex couple as adoptive parents—with the syllable “Thwack”:

Dear Judge—
Thwack, thwack.

Keith’s lyrical concision creates a less-is-more effect. Using fewer words, carefully chosen and arranged, creates space for a greater reach, broadening and heightening the emotional dimensions of her story. The lines on her and her partner’s marriage ceremony (another event that would likely get extended treatment in an ordinary memoir) provide another example, a literary reference taking an unexpected turn into a simple but powerful image:

I had not yet come close

to gathering my thoughts on “Marriage”
the brilliant long scrutiny by Marianne Moore

when there I found myself at one side of the priest
holding onto the hands of Amor.

The perfect example, though, is the poem’s concluding section, “December Light,” just seven jewellike pages, each of only a few short, widely spaced lines. Enlisting the help of Milton (the concluding lines of Paradise Lost) and Christina Rossetti (some phrases from the Christmas poem “In the Bleak Midwinter”), Keith celebrates the arrival of her and her partner’s adopted children. With the homeliest of details (“a gutter nailed on the side of a house”) Keith achieves a visionary intensity. The children? Twin boys. Two of everything.

Paul Scott Stanfield was educated at Grinnell College and Northwestern University, and is recently retired from the English Department of Nebraska Wesleyan University. He is the author of Yeats and Politics in the 1930s and of articles on Yeats, other Irish poets, and Wyndham Lewis.