Kooser’s Column 228 – Woloch’s My Mother’s Pillow

Posted by Linda Sue Grimes Aug 15, 2009

Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry

While serving as the U. S. Poet Laureate 2004 to 2006, Nebraska poet Ted Kooser launched his series of weekly columns called American Life in Poetry. These columns are offered free to newspapers to dramatize the value and just plain fun of poetry and to demonstrate how poetry enhances life in America.

Kooser’s Commentary

Kooser introduces the poem: “I don't often mention literary forms, but of this lovely poem by Cecilia Woloch I want to suggest that the form, a villanelle, which uses a pattern of repetition, adds to the enchantment I feel in reading it. It has a kind of layering, like memory itself. Woloch lives and teaches in southern California.”

The Poem

This poem has a disturbing, condescending tone, and says more about the speaker of the poem than it does about the subject, the speaker’s mother. It is a typical atheist/agnostic, postmodernist appraisal, easily forgotten, if ever read in the first place. I'm afraid Kooser's assessment of this poem is too kind and utterly simplistic.

The first two tercets of "My Mother's Pillow:

My mother sleeps with the Bible open on her pillow;

she reads herself to sleep and wakens startled.

She listens for her heart: each breath is shallow.

For years her hands were quick with thread and needle.

She used to sew all night when we were little;

now she sleeps with the Bible on her pillow

To read the rest of this verse, Column 228 .