As a reader who mainly enjoys novels, I was initially apprehensive about reading a book of poetry. However, to my surprise and delight, I found Laurie Klein’s book of poetry, House of 49 Doors: Entries in a Life, accessible and gripping, rooted in time and place, with an overarching structure not dissimilar to that of a novel.
House of 49 Doors centers around Fowler House, an old, idiosyncratic structure that, although it appears to be “a rich man’s house, from the front,” is revealed to be “mortared with sorrow” (19). Each poem in this collection is a door into a memory. These memories are connected like rooms in a house, and walking through them provides an intimate, often humorous, sometimes heartbreaking picture of a family haunted by traumas and harboring secrets. One poem’s title aptly states, “A Family with Four Back Doors Has Something to Hide” (19).
One of the most striking features of House of 49 Doors is Klein’s use of two distinct main narrative voices, which both recur throughout the book. The first voice, Larkin, represents Klein’s childhood self and is easily distinguishable by its lack of punctuation. Full of springy verbs and onomatopoeia, Larkin’s poems are precocious, breathless, and fun-filled.
The second main voice, Eldergirl, represents Klein’s adult self. As befits a narrator “awash with decades” (57), Eldergirl’s voice is more subdued and reflective. Her retrospective musings, while covering approximately the same territory as Larkin’s poems, allow for a clearer, more nuanced view of the tragedies that haunt the book, the chief one of which is the protagonist’s Uncle Dunkel’s death by suicide.
The poem “Agent Larkin Hides a Letter under the Loose Bathroom Tile” conveys Larkin’s visceral pain in the days following Uncle Dunkel’s death. The poem opens:
Dear Uncle Dunkel How could you
Since you died
it's like everything's underwater
Later in the poem, a description of Larkin’s mom and Nana making Christmas meatballs merges grotesquely with the family’s grief:
They are working the cold raw meat
in separate bowls
glinty with blood and animal fat…
They mix everything up
No one says Jesus is coming
and you are gone Dear uncle
their fingers under the faucet twist
and scrub at the sickly
grease I can smell from here (66)
Eldergirl’s reflections on Uncle Dunkel’s passing are less immediate and more lyrical, but her thoughts in “Eldergirl, on One Knee, Finds a Snail” reveal that the tragedy still haunts her decades later. In this poem, Eldergirl addresses a snail as it “ooze[s] across [her] palm”:
I know
people gather your rich opalescence
to soothe the seething wound, minimize scars…
And if this were a miracle
and your quicksilver ministration, true,
I would kneel beneath the sycamore tree
where they cut my uncle's body loose,
and I would smooth your essence 'round
and around his mangled throat, even now. (81)
House of 49 Doors is the best kind of poetry book–the kind in which the poems stand up well individually but, when viewed together, create something greater–in this case, a sprawling, slightly ramshackle structure redolent with nostalgia and grief but still sparkling with life. In this collection, Laurie Klein explores how memories are layered and interconnected. Although I would stop short of saying her poems make sense of tragedy, they uncover some beauty in the midst of it, and that is the most we can expect in poetry and life.