Pink Lady
By Denise Duhamel
In Denise Duhamel’s latest collection of poetry, Pink Lady, the poet brings us inside the difficult experience of losing a beloved parent, and all that comes with it. Duhamel’s poems about the slow decline of her mother’s health, becoming her caretaker, and ultimately her mother’s death, are tender elegies for the elderly, humanizing the complicated and messy journey of one of life’s hardest goodbyes. In “Butterfly Poem,” Duhamel writes: “I tell her/about Dolly Parton’s butterfly tattoos. My mother/is in too much pain for another needle, even one/filled with pretty ink.” And in “A Taste for Bananas,” a warmly humorous poem about food habits in old age and the memories we keep and pass on, the poet writes: “Before was went to the nursing home,/my mother bought three bananas/each week—one yellow, one yellow-ish, and one green. She sliced a half each/morning on her Honey Bunches of Oats./It became a family joke—the care/with which she picked her bananas,/how she didn’t want to die/with too many bananas left to rot.” These poems are bittersweet gifts that endure, beautifully memorialized by a daughter to the woman who made her.
Image courtesy of University of Pittsburgh Press
