Mothers Over Nangahar
by Pamela Hart

Reviewed by Adam Karr

In Book I of Homer’s Iliad, we read of Thetis’ grief for her son Achilles: “My child, My child, / Why did I raise you to all this misery? […] And now not only / Will you die young, but you have to suffer as well.” Thetis knows that Achilles will die in the Trojan War. Her lament is not for her son’s death, but rather that he could die “with no honor at all.” Her only agency is to manipulate Zues and the Olympic pantheon to ensure his death brings him fame. As is too often the case, The Iliad belongs to son and his “honor,” not the mother and her grief.

It is here that Pamela Hart, winner of the 2017 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry for her collection Mothers Over Nangahar, recasts the experience of war through the eyes of history’s mothers. Mothers Over Nangahar is a collection of poems that narrates the experience of an American mother whose child is fighting in Afghanistan. Each piece focalizes the mother’s anguish channeled through images and reflections on her child, an intense and singularly intimate approach that reorients the canon of war literature towards the mothers who lose everything.

The perennial setting is Nangahar Province, Afghanistan, the embattled area through which Osama Bin Laden escaped to Pakistan in 2001, and then saw the rise of ISIS-K in Afghanistan in 2015. The history of warfare in Nangahar is as timeless as the history of mothers worrying for children at war. Home to the Khyber Pass, battles between Russia and Britain during the “Great Game” in the 19^th century, and back to Alexander the Great, and further back still, Nangahar provides an image-rich landscape that puts this war in conversation with the entire history of warfare. Like the speaker that is both mother to her child and mother to every child at war, Nangahar is home to this battle… and to every battle.

The first utterance in the collection – “Dear one / […] Oh you of frenzied armor / Carve this song / Into your bullet” – frames a dedication to the mother that obsesses, and then insecurely self-immolates, over her child at war. “Dear one” is the child and thus black hole of the speaker’s mind. In each poem, the “one” addressed is the speaker’s own child, while the “song” that each speaker sings is a continuation of a story that every mother of a soldier has lived. Each poem navigates a tangled web of conflicted impulses. The speaker wants to acknowledge the importance of her child’s sacrifice and mission, the historical context in which that sacrifice is necessary, and the necessity of her own sacrifice. But there remains the impulse for resentment, and for the comfort of knowing the child is safe at home instead of fighting in an unknown place. Hart at once demands we listen, understand, and immerse ourselves in the pain of the mother.

The speaker’s obsession begins with the image of the child as part of herself. Various images pixelate and morph into versions of her son and the war he fights. “Venice” becomes “Kabul,” a “shawl” becomes “war’s embrace,” “clouds” become “my worry list,” and “strawberries” create “pools of blood.” Interspersed allusions to classical images and comforting aphorisms place the speaker’s anguish in historical context. She draws comparisons to “Spartan women” and “Gilded pages of […] Persian blue calligraphy,” searches for meaning in cryptic phrases from Sun Tzu’s Art of War, sees her child in everything, and searches for omens of his safety everywhere.

The speaker demands that the reader participate in her anguish, but she also apologizes to the reader for that imposition. Insecurity and anxious self-awareness creep into the verse to create moments that are lyrically beautiful and emotionally tense. Rendering a conversation with another mother, she recalls “What about your son, Kathy / wonders but really / she wants to talk about her son / Tim in Afghanistan”. The speaker wants to empathize just like she demands others empathize, but the obsession with her own child is overpowering. The obsession forms a coded language of this generation’s war veterans, creating an exclusive and cliched ‘if you know, you know’ atmosphere. Only the person who has experienced the obsession of worrying for a Soldier at war and struggled to feign interest in anything else can truly understand a verse about that anguish. But the speaker demands everyone acknowledge its ubiquity, even though “words aren’t enough are they ever I ask.”

Like the conflicted impulse to demand attention but also apologize for the demand, the speaker also struggles to reconcile a contradictory desire for, yet fear of, information. “I guard against too much news / but headlines mark my face,” the speaker remarks in a piece filled with grotesque images of war. The horrifying prospect of learning her child has been hurt or killed torments the speaker, but she cannot help, “scanning the air / waves for more,” all the while fearing the moment when, “We unspool our biggest / dread.” The speaker occasionally finds moments of resolution when she disengages with the sounds and images that surround her and focuses on her writing project. Here she draws out her pain, “My pencil working its way into the story of a son.” The relief is always temporary, and like an addiction, the poems return to a compulsive obsession with her child and the war that surrounds him.

Mothers Over Nangahar searches frantically for a story to capture the contradictions and interdependencies that consume mothers with children at war. In each poem, the mother-speaker searches the images and sounds that surround her, the history of letters and war, the pain she feels so acutely, and the art she creates to express that pain. Almost always, the articulation is powerful but frenetic and disorienting, like a still painting that is beautifully rendered but leaves us asking about context. However, at the midpoint of the collection, Pamela Hart offers a moment of clarity in the poem, “War Stories.” Bereft of elaborate images and esoteric allusions, this poem fires a burst of staccato statements that, for a moment, simplify the tumult that engulfs the mother into a single revelation: that the story of a mother worrying for her child at war is a story whose end is yet to be told, “a story on the idea of war and the son who might kill or be / killed.” Put into context with the images and allusions across the entire collection of Mothers Over Nangahar, we see that Hart’s story is a continuation of every mother’s story. And just like it was since the writing of Thetis’ grief, this same story will likely continue to be told far into the future.