Whole Houses Shaking

Whole Houses Shaking by Jim Bodeen is, first of all, a book of spaces and voices. A major focus of the book is getting the voices of the people who made up the history of the family into the poems. Ironically, it is also a book of silences both because the poet's father is silent and because his mother although she speaks, sometimes excessively, is unable to articulate her ideas coherently.The book is divided into three parts although all the poems together form an intensely intertwined narrative. The first part contains only two poems attempting to define the two spaces, Bowbells North Dakota and Seattle Washington that provide the background for the book and to establish the major voices of the poem, especially that of the poet's mother. The second section relates the death of the poet's father from cancer through a series of poems that focus upon the father's illness and a simultaneous attempt to get to know the father. The third section focuses upon the poet's childhood in Bowbells North Dakota as he tries to understand and accept his father.An overriding presence in this book is the eighteenth century religious and liturgical poet Christopher Smart. Smart appears in four ways. There are a number of direct mentions of him in the early poems and he is treated extensively in For Grief Embraced Quiet Father, the central poem of the collection. Secondly he is identified with the poet's grandfather, a poet who was also locked away for religious mania like Christopher Smart. The grandfather, like Smart himself, is a frequent presence in the book and the grandson goes beyond his father to claim the grandfather as a predecessor. Although he is searching for the father, he insists upon reinterpreting the life of the grandfather as well. Bodeen also uses a number of poetic techniques pioneered by Smart in this collection, especially in For Grief Embraced. The poem is based loosely upon the form of Jubliate Agno although rather than using For and Let verses Bodeen alternates two types of For verses. The most obvious relation to Smart though is the insistence upon praise that is the motive and subject of the book. The poet acknowledges Christopher Smart who taught us how to praise when praise seemed the thing we were least capable of and then goes on throughout the book to demonstrate this debt in his constant praise of God and gratitude to persons who were involved in the moment of family crisis.Whole Houses Shaking is at once a profound and a humorous work. The poems offer precise detail and create an image of failure in the midst of an America where everyone is supposed to succeed but go beyond this portrait to reach acceptance and even to find joy in the narrative. This is one of the most moving collections of poems that I have read.