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Anne Whitehouse (www.annewhitehouse.com) is a writer of poetry, fiction and journalism, and has worked in development for non-profit agencies. She has taught in colleges, universities, and public schools in the greater New York Metropolitan area. She is the author of the novel Fall Love and the poetry collections, The Surveyor’s Hand, Blessings and Curses, and Bear in Mind.

Life is full of pleasures and sorrows, “blessings and curses falling on us equally.” In Anne Whitehouse’s book of poetry, Blessings and Curses, the poet guides us through the journey of sadness, wistfulness, anger, peace, strength, frustration and quiet wonder.

Writers in particular will smile and nod at two familiar stops on the journey. In “Blessing XXVIII” poets give their poems away
“because they are written for joy…
A braided rope of meaning and sound descends for me to climb
and I feel the blessing radiate through my being like sunlight”

While the words are so much more than “examinations and licenses, petitions and contracts, diagnoses, analyses, prescriptions”
“…for poets, words have weight and color and music
The poet, watching and listening
follows a mysterious impulse.”

Curled up with a notebook, or sitting at a computer determined to create, Whitehouse’s “Curse 24” sharply focuses on self-doubt, distraction and focus as “criticized, I brook and suffer…I turn on myself and eat out my heart”
“Whirling gusts pluck the last leaves from the trees
My mind babbles;
I am plagued by thoughts,
How to extract the quiet self
……Yet I made it harder than it had to be,
afraid of attention,
unwilling to permit mistakes…
Let these curses dry up…
They are life itself.
They have my attention.”

Whitehouse’s observations are clear-eyed and mature even with difficult subjects. She provides a twist on the horrors of human history, focusing not on the often-reported scenes of September 11, 2001, and of the bombing of Hiroshima (“Curse XI) but the quiet, deep impact of their aftermath by a refugee:
“Suddenly I saw a flash/like the sun/going into the ocean/bright red…I was thirteen years old…Even so—hearing a plane (now) flying over the Hudson River, I flash back/Be glad when you see a plane that trails only white vapor/with no bomb to drop.” (Curse XI)

Subtle and skilled storytelling let Blessings and Curses give us a life scene and watch it unfold in pictures rather than recitation. In “Curse II” a simple statements vividly depict a distant relative and his wife; In “Curse XIII,” siblings speak volumes silently:
“By fighting with each other/we justified our parents’ discord…/anger became our common language/the only discourse we shared/after speech failed…” (Curse XIII)

But in “Blessing X,” affection is spelled in the scenery and detail of a beloved teacher’s home:
“…piano music issued from this house/For several hours every day/Louder in summer/when the windows were flung open/but also in winter/muffled by panes of glass/sinking soft as lamplight/on the snow./For Eleanor, cursed by deafness/music came to live inside her…/Her love of the art/and the instrument/she surrounded herself/with images of angels/her abiding wish/was to instruct by delight.”

Whitehouse frequently visits nature, in her work, taking blessings from even locust season (“They were no plague but a blessing/to remind us of the vastness/greatness, and mystery of creation” from “Blessing VII”) and drawing on wistful memories of collecting shells to illustrate a relationship:
“Looking down, I tread lightly…/searching among the spoils of nature/for the delicate, defectless ones/I never tire of finding…My husband said/You think they are valuable…/I like finding them, too/then I put them in a closet…/Yet he loves them/as a family heritage/his grandparents’ beloved activity/shared with their descendants/which he’s passed on.”

The fluidity, the rise and fall, the relationships of blessings and curses runs a current through to the last words of the last poem, where a beautiful work of art will be sent back to the waters
(…I thought of the beautiful designs/of the Wheel of Life, their inner meanings…/It seemed tragic to me, but not to him…/It mattered not…that nothing lasted/and I counted it a blessing and a curse.”)
But unlike the work of art returning to the sea, or Moses nearing the Promised Land, never to set foot in it (“Blessings and Curses,” the first poem in the book), Blessings and Curses leaves behind a blessing—a rich collection of poetic observation of the balance of life’s pleasures and sorrows, a permanence for the reader.

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