Singing From the Deep End
by Rebecca Hart Olander
(CavanKerry, 2026) Reviewed by Carla Panciera
Singing From the Deep End
by Rebecca Hart Olander
CavanKerry 2026
Rebecca Hart Olander’s newest book, Singing From the Deep End, is a collection both elegiac and celebratory, a deeply personal book that examines the bonds between women that form, haunt, and sustain them.
The book is divided into three sections: poems of childhood, poems that deal with the loss of a beloved friend, and poems about motherhood. Each section begins with a poem about a lesson. More importantly, each section of this book is full of love poems, to mothers and children, to friends, to places, and to the past. Far from being sentimental, these are love poems full of emotional complexity and the ways in which we navigate both towards and away from what we hold most close.
The opening poems in this book are set in Gloucester, Massachusetts, on the homeland of the Pawtucket people. For them and for the colonizers who displaced them, fishing was both sustenance and a part of their identity. The sea claims those who live beside it, makes them wary, always on alert because they know that, at any time, something much more powerful can change the course of their lives. Although Olander moves inland as an adult, she admits: “Tidal, time and again I return . . . Does the Atlantic recognize us in its mirror?” If so, is she guaranteed any solace?
She claims the personality of her hardscrabble hometown: As a young child, she sucks on a lobster claw, passes galleries full of seascapes and granite quarries “cold and deep.” The harbor is full of seals and fishing boats over which she spies “the blue bell towers of Our Lady of Good Voyage Church.” But despite the idyllic details of place, these poems are taut with uncertainty, a life balanced, like the vessels that sustain generations of fishermen and their families, between the surface of things and their darker depths.
If Olander’s previous collection, Uncertain Acrobats, was a tribute to her father, then this collection is much more a celebration of her mother who is initially captured both in poetry and in Kodachrome before she was a mother. “Together,” Olander writes, “we claimed an ocean.” She describes her mother practicing yoga, playing guitar, waiting tables in a seaside restaurant while her daughter perches on a barstool “working [her] potholder loom.”
Deftly, though, Olander balances both a child’s mythology of Mother with the realities of single parenting. Yes, her mother creates a bedroom space for the young poet with the sea-green rug and lavender walls she pined for. She purchases a banana seat bicycle via layaway. In “Attachment” the daughter recognizes: “We lived in desperate times, but she didn’t want us to / steep in that, rearranged what she could so we’d have / what we wanted,” yet in the same poem she understands that “nothing was ever secured.” The bike is stolen, the house’s door kept unlocked.
When her daughter pees the bed, the mother sets the mattress out onto the roof to dry it in view of anyone who happens by causing her daughter to feel both shame for her own actions and for her mother’s as she sits smoking pot with friends. What the poet captures is that terrifying balance between contradictory emotions felt when the fallibility of adults is finally made clear to us.
In “On Learning to Say No” a boy the speaker doesn’t like visits, and her mother allows him into her bedroom. When he tries to force the girl back onto the bed, she resists. Olander writes:
Just a beat too early, she is made to assume the role of adult, and the reader senses both her unreadiness and the danger it forebodes. In this town that carves names of those who disappear at sea without a trace onto a public monument, she senses all too well how illusory the idea of safety is.
Part I also chronicles girlhood and all its strange intimacies. Children know the inside of others’ houses the way adults never can once the place is cleaned up for real guests and everyone is on their best behavior. But on those days reserved for play, girls practice kissing by kissing one another. They recognize one another’s shameful thrift store finds but keep each other’s secret. They understand how to avoid angry fathers, but not necessarily predatory ones. In “Unearthing and Burying My Old Friend Jennifer with a Golden Shovel,” the collection’s darkest and most heartbreaking poem, a friend’s father molests both his own daughter and her guest. The daughter grows up to battle addiction which eventually kills her. Olander writes, "That bucket on a rope I lower in secret, it / filled, then overflowed, now that I’m really / the only one who knows how our story goes."
by Rebecca Hart Olander
CavanKerry 2026
Rebecca Hart Olander’s newest book, Singing From the Deep End, is a collection both elegiac and celebratory, a deeply personal book that examines the bonds between women that form, haunt, and sustain them.
The book is divided into three sections: poems of childhood, poems that deal with the loss of a beloved friend, and poems about motherhood. Each section begins with a poem about a lesson. More importantly, each section of this book is full of love poems, to mothers and children, to friends, to places, and to the past. Far from being sentimental, these are love poems full of emotional complexity and the ways in which we navigate both towards and away from what we hold most close.
The opening poems in this book are set in Gloucester, Massachusetts, on the homeland of the Pawtucket people. For them and for the colonizers who displaced them, fishing was both sustenance and a part of their identity. The sea claims those who live beside it, makes them wary, always on alert because they know that, at any time, something much more powerful can change the course of their lives. Although Olander moves inland as an adult, she admits: “Tidal, time and again I return . . . Does the Atlantic recognize us in its mirror?” If so, is she guaranteed any solace?
She claims the personality of her hardscrabble hometown: As a young child, she sucks on a lobster claw, passes galleries full of seascapes and granite quarries “cold and deep.” The harbor is full of seals and fishing boats over which she spies “the blue bell towers of Our Lady of Good Voyage Church.” But despite the idyllic details of place, these poems are taut with uncertainty, a life balanced, like the vessels that sustain generations of fishermen and their families, between the surface of things and their darker depths.
If Olander’s previous collection, Uncertain Acrobats, was a tribute to her father, then this collection is much more a celebration of her mother who is initially captured both in poetry and in Kodachrome before she was a mother. “Together,” Olander writes, “we claimed an ocean.” She describes her mother practicing yoga, playing guitar, waiting tables in a seaside restaurant while her daughter perches on a barstool “working [her] potholder loom.”
Deftly, though, Olander balances both a child’s mythology of Mother with the realities of single parenting. Yes, her mother creates a bedroom space for the young poet with the sea-green rug and lavender walls she pined for. She purchases a banana seat bicycle via layaway. In “Attachment” the daughter recognizes: “We lived in desperate times, but she didn’t want us to / steep in that, rearranged what she could so we’d have / what we wanted,” yet in the same poem she understands that “nothing was ever secured.” The bike is stolen, the house’s door kept unlocked.
When her daughter pees the bed, the mother sets the mattress out onto the roof to dry it in view of anyone who happens by causing her daughter to feel both shame for her own actions and for her mother’s as she sits smoking pot with friends. What the poet captures is that terrifying balance between contradictory emotions felt when the fallibility of adults is finally made clear to us.
In “On Learning to Say No” a boy the speaker doesn’t like visits, and her mother allows him into her bedroom. When he tries to force the girl back onto the bed, she resists. Olander writes:
Afterward, I couldn’t erase
the impression he left in my room, the same space
with my dollhouse still set up, its tiny lamps
and rugs, each figure right where I placed them,
fake fruit in the bowl and a baby in the cradle.
Later, when he called my house, my mother
extended the coils in my direction, handing me
the phone. Say I’m not here, I hissed,
but she made me tell him myself.
the impression he left in my room, the same space
with my dollhouse still set up, its tiny lamps
and rugs, each figure right where I placed them,
fake fruit in the bowl and a baby in the cradle.
Later, when he called my house, my mother
extended the coils in my direction, handing me
the phone. Say I’m not here, I hissed,
but she made me tell him myself.
Just a beat too early, she is made to assume the role of adult, and the reader senses both her unreadiness and the danger it forebodes. In this town that carves names of those who disappear at sea without a trace onto a public monument, she senses all too well how illusory the idea of safety is.
Part I also chronicles girlhood and all its strange intimacies. Children know the inside of others’ houses the way adults never can once the place is cleaned up for real guests and everyone is on their best behavior. But on those days reserved for play, girls practice kissing by kissing one another. They recognize one another’s shameful thrift store finds but keep each other’s secret. They understand how to avoid angry fathers, but not necessarily predatory ones. In “Unearthing and Burying My Old Friend Jennifer with a Golden Shovel,” the collection’s darkest and most heartbreaking poem, a friend’s father molests both his own daughter and her guest. The daughter grows up to battle addiction which eventually kills her. Olander writes, "That bucket on a rope I lower in secret, it / filled, then overflowed, now that I’m really / the only one who knows how our story goes."
In fact, the poem “Girls. I Knew. I Was.” meditates on all of the girls the speaker might have been, a startling illumination of the potency of female relationships, the ways in which girlhood and its bonds wound and mold and prepare us, not just for challenges ahead, but also for the deep and abiding love that is possible between women:
The constant competition of being a girl.
Always looking around for who outshone,
who stuck the better landing.
Such a carnival ride. Such a disaster,
Always looking around for who outshone,
who stuck the better landing.
Such a carnival ride. Such a disaster,
Such moments also allow for the kind of love Olander explores in Part II of the collection, "The Jerica Poems," inspired by the death of her best friend from breast cancer at 48 years old.
These pages chronicle moments of intimacy—taking turns carrying a netted sack of oranges in Barcelona, New Year’s Eve fireworks from the steps of a youth hostel, getting cartilage piercings, hiking local mountains—moments that are the reward for practicing girlhood’s intense loyalties, withstanding its crushing rejections, and realizing both the shock of coming so close to one person and the equal surprise of recognizing her strangehood.
In the searing and achingly insightful, “Maid of Honor,” the poet sits in a hotel lobby as a bride and her witness head off to the bathroom together:
I wanted to call her back,
watching the scallops of her sculpted dress return to the dance
floor, wanted to tell her: It doesn’t get any better than this.
And I wouldn’t have meant pledging one’s self to a spouse,
or the way all heads turned to her when she entered the room,
but the way her friend must have stood there in the handicapped
stall, lifted the undone carcass of boned silk and lace
while the bride peed, stockings peeled into tight coils
around her calves, and then how the bride must have done
the same, hiked up that lavender gown.
watching the scallops of her sculpted dress return to the dance
floor, wanted to tell her: It doesn’t get any better than this.
And I wouldn’t have meant pledging one’s self to a spouse,
or the way all heads turned to her when she entered the room,
but the way her friend must have stood there in the handicapped
stall, lifted the undone carcass of boned silk and lace
while the bride peed, stockings peeled into tight coils
around her calves, and then how the bride must have done
the same, hiked up that lavender gown.
The final part of the book begins with “Carrying Lessons,” insight gleaned from the killer whale, Tahlequah, who carried her dead calf on her head for several days: “I’m swimming through / these days the best I can, / like anyone / who’d rather hold her gone girl / than eat the dwindling salmon.”
Toting all her lessons, the speaker gets to move forward in life: to motherhood, to acknowledging her own aging and that of her mother. She must accept that any living creature has no more power over its own healing than it does what causes the grief in the first place.
Initially a single mother herself and riding along dark roads, she praises her daughter in the back seat who “speaks in tongues / keeping me within the lines.” When she watches her son search for just the right words in a thank you note, she realizes: “I’ve passed on some tendril of my being.”
Though once she traveled Europe with a beloved friend, now she explores Iceland with her mother and daughter, she attends concerts with her son, she passes along her own history to her children by listing “the names of flowers that once bloomed in the yards of [my] own childhood.”
To love, as this poet has, words and places and people, exacts a cost, but ultimately Olander reminds us to “praise the bursting season, legs pumping / up the hill, stepping on stones, / avoiding roots, knowing / it is fleeting, and that winter will make other paths.”
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