Anne-Marie OomenRecensioni

I was supposed to read this book for a class in college but never got around to it, so I figured I would give it a shot now. I love the back and forth between the mermaid and the girl, and I find that the artwork perfectly complements the poems. It is an apt story that captures the mysterious magic of Lake Michigan. I'm glad I read it.

The title, AS LONG AS I KNOW YOU, was her mother's answer when Anne-Marie Oomen asked her how she would know if her quality of life was still okay, still bearable. Because this, her latest memoir, acts, in fact, as her long goodbye to her mother, who died at 99, alone, in a nursing home in 2020, in the lockdown phase of the Covid pandemic. Their relationship was never an easy one, and Oomen doesn't cut herself any slack, as she details their ups and downs, from her rebellious teen years to the guilt-ridden last years of her mother's life, as Ruth Oomen slipped ever deeper into the not-knowing that is dementia.

This is a deeply personal book, as are all of Oomen's memoirs. There is humor here, but not a lot. The prose, as always, flows like poetry, telling the story of a very complex, often troubled mother-daughter relationship. I'm a guy, and had a good relationship with my mother, but (and I hate to use this cliche) I could feel her pain. And her story is so compelling ... Well, more cliches, dammit.

I'm not going to try to pick out any particular parts or passages to dwell on. I can't. It's all just too much of a piece to try to parse. And there is too much pain involved.

My mother died in a nursing home too, at 96. I wasn't there. The guilt and the sadness still haunt me, nearly a decade later. So, even though I knew how this book would end, I read its last pages through tears. I get it, Anne-Marie. I get it. It's about loss, guilt, regret, grief. But mostly it's about love. And as the song said, sometimes "love hurts." I can't imagine how hard it must have been to write this book. But I am so glad you did. It is a beautiful thing you've made, Anne-Marie. This Mom Book. This love letter to mortality. My very highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER

Beautiful!

HOUSE OF FIELDS, by Anne-Marie Oomen.

I've had this book on my shelf for several years now, and read it with great enjoyment when it was new, back in 2006. Having just read and - and liked - Oomen's book of poems from that same year, UNCODED WOMAN, I thought I would revisit this elegant collection of memories from her childhood on a west Michigan farm near Hart. I found it every bit as delightful this time through as the first time, perhaps even more so, having now met the author a few times at readings and book signings.

In HOUSE OF FIELDS, Oomen takes us on a journey through her elementary school years, which began with kindergarten in the one-room Kelly School just down the road from her family farm. It was to be the last year for that school, and many others like it, as rural school districts began to "consolidate." She spent a few years in a new consolidated public school, then went on to a Catholic school taught by Dominican nuns.

Although Oomen builds her memories around her early educational experience, there is also much here about her parents - hard-working Catholics struggling to do the best they can to raise five kids. (Anne-Marie is the oldest.) And her own interior life is front and center as she tries to figure out how the world works, has problems initially learning to read (which finally "clicks" in the third grade, when she suddenly becomes a "reader"), witnesses the sadness and mystery of deaths among her family and friends, and wonders why she often feels "alone" - until she figures out that maybe this is normal.

An extremely curious child, she struggles with "being good," and tells of childhood injuries and scars - two physical and one emotional and more traumatic, this last described in an essay called "Harm," which is perhaps the most moving piece in the whole book.

Bottom line? I loved this book. The gender difference was no obstacle. Having grown up next door to my grandparents' farm, and having gone to a one-room school, then Catholic school, I could relate. But what makes this book so enjoyable is that it is simply beautiful writing, chock full of wonder, wit and wisdom. Very highly recommended to anyone who loves books and good writing.

UNCODED WOMAN: POEMS, by Anne-Marie Oomen.

I don't read a lot of poetry, because I often find myself flummoxed or mystified when I do. Not so much with this slim collection, which I wanted to read because I have so loved all four books of Oomen's prose, from her first, PULLING DOWN THE BARN, to her latest, LOVE, SEX, & 4-H. And in fact I liked these poems very much, finding them at once both accessible and very moving. The poems themselves form a narrative arc - a story - which is quite easy to follow. The speaker is the same in all the poems, a woman from New Orleans named 'Bead' (short for Beatrice), who, in the opening poem ("KS 1 I Have Taken the Line"), is "... on the run / ... My truck is military green and stole, / rest of me is black and blue, so down / and out, I don't know where I'll go."

Bead picks up a hitchhiker, a man part Native American, first name 'Barn,' and lands in northern Michigan, where he is from. Fleeing from a brutal father who has sexually abused her, Bead approaches Barn very carefully, "... trying to scent / where home is, if I want it" ("NE You Should Proceed with Great Caution").

Barn is a skilled fisherman, who knows lakes big and small, rivers and streams. In "FO I Will Keep Close to You," Bead studies him -

"So. After I marry Barn, I watch him fish. Salmon,
trout, perch, bass run to his lines and nets.

I guess if they must be caught, it would best
be his wide hands, large as burdock leaves,

his touch
sweet as bait on skilled line -

and the kill, when the time comes,
small as a star."

As a couple Bead and Barn have their highs and lows, but he builds a cabin and they begin to sink roots ("QX I Request Permission to Anchor"). But her abusive past still haunts her. The poems do not reflect an easy journey for Bead. There is not even any promise that things will end happily. But this is a tale in verse that will make you think; you will find yourself rooting for this woman. I've only had the book a couple days, but I think I have now read it at least six times. There is much to be gleaned from these carefully chosen words, and I keep finding new things each time through.

The titles of the poems here are signal codes taken from THE INTERNATIONAL CODE OF SIGNALS, a mariners communications manual that Bede finds a copy of in a local store and steals ("FZ 1 I Am Continuing to Search"). Hmm .. a battered refugee from the Gulf transplanted to the northern shores of Lake Michigan, and sailors' signals as metaphors. Does this work? Yes, and it works very well.

And speaking of northern Michigan, I wondered if the Art's Bar visited in a couple of the poems was a tip of the hat to Art's Tavern in Glen Arbor, a venue well-known to Oomen and the Beach Bards, a group of poets from the Traverse City area of which she is often a member.

But the characters that people these poems are not from the artists and poets strata of northern Michigan. Quite the opposite. Bead and Barn and their friends are more apt to be the kind eager to harvest a road-killed buck, take up residence in a junked Airstream, grow earthworms in the cellar, or sell the pelts of half grown fox kits. People scratching for a living on the fringes of society. It is a down-and-dirty, gritty, hardscrabble kind of existence, and Oomen has captured it in excruciating detail.

Poetry. Too often it leaves me scratching my head wondering, Huh? Not these poems. There's a story here, and a damn good one, worthy of repeated readings. Very highly recommended.

LOVE, SEX, AND 4-H: A MEMOIR, by Anne-Marie Oomen.
Simply stated, this is just one of the best damn books I have read in years. Anne-Marie Oomen has somehow magically managed to capture the essence of what it meant to be young in that happening decade that was the sixties. Yes, it could be called a "rural" memoir, since Oomen did grow up on a farm in west Michigan, but, because of the way she tells her own story against the backdrop of all that happened during those years, she makes it relevant to everyone who grew up then, because she'll make you remember where you were and what you were doing back then. Sputnik, the Cold War, fallout shelters, duck and cover drills, the Cuban Missile Crisis, assassinations, Vietnam, urban unrest and rioting, the moon landing and more - it's all in here, juxtaposed against her more personal memories of family, 4-H, Catholic education, followed by an eye-opening transition to public high school, where she experienced her first date, first dance, first boyfriend, first kiss, sexual awakening. Yeah, all that stuff, and it's delivered with the sensitivity of a poet and the wit and timing of a stand-up comic. I know that sounds like an unlikely and difficult combo, but Oomen somehow pulls it off, often combining serious and thoughtful with laugh-out-loud hilarious.

One other book sprang to mind while I was reading Oomen's memoir. It was Debra Marquart's THE HORIZONTAL WORLD: GROWING UP WILD IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE, another fine coming of age memoir I have often recommended. But quite frankly, Oomen's tale is uniquely Oomen, a continuation of her other fine books, especially her first, PULLING DOWN THE BARN. Anne-Marie Oomen is a Michigan treasure, and could easily become a national one. I flat out loved this book. My highest recommendation. TEN stars!

Ever since reading with great enjoyment and admiration Anne-Marie Oomen's first memoir, PULLING DOWN THE BARN, I have kept a sharp eye out for any new prose pieces from her. Her second memoir, HOUSE OF FIELDS, was another small treasure. I came away from both of those books with that feeling of having "gone to different schools together," probably because of a shared background of small towns, farming country and a Catholic upbringing. And yet I have also always felt just a little bit intimidated by Oomen's writing, which invariably shows a richly poetic, deeply feminine and a subtly nuanced sensibility and imagination which I despair of ever completely understanding. I guess you could say she got a whole lot more out those "different schools" than I did. Or maybe she's just smarter than I am. But I keep on trying to learn.

In any case, I was pleased to learn of her latest offering, a book of essays called AN AMERICAN MAP. Glancing at the contents and the far-flung settings for each piece, I think I almost hollered, "Hot dog!" Because I have always loved to travel through books. In fact I'm pretty sure I enjoy book-travel a lot more than the real thing. It's so much more comfortable, ya know? The essays here were prompted by Oomen's travels over the past several years, and she has certainly covered ground: from Maine and D.C. in the east to Washington and California in the west, and as far south as Arizona and Puerto Rico with several stops in those middle places too, particularly her beloved home state of Michigan.

Oomen admits early on in the collection that at least some of these trips were spurred by a sense of restlessness and wintertime "cabin fever." But she also speaks of a vague feeling of melancholia, sadness even, which she can't fully explain, but which had caused in her a dismaying case of writer's block. That sadness, that "weight of the world" comes through in several of these pieces, as she visits places as different as Mount Cardigan, New Hampshire, and Washington, D.C. in the essays, "Stone Wounds" and "The Underpass."

Climbing that mountain in New Hampshire, making her way up steep slopes of granite striated with shiny streaks of quartz, she remembers a story told by Isaac, an old Native American she knew as a girl in her native Oceana County in Michigan. Isaac told her of a battle between the People before time began in which all were killed, but the battle was so great that the warriors, when they died, "turned to great dark stones, marked by lines of lighter horizontal color." Recalling this years later on a mountain side in New Hampshire, she writes, "... with my hands I touch a wide line of running quartz ... the lines identified the stones as warriors."

In D.C. that same underlying sadness rises again to the surface when she is suddenly "undone" at her first glimpse of the Vietnam Memorial Wall.

"All along that slick and momentous length are names that, from a step back, become human texture in stone ... I come close, touch the dark surface ... run my fingers down a row."

Once again, lines in stone identifying warriors, but this time from a not-so-distant past, and part of the source of that ineffable sadness and "weight of the world" that sometimes threatens to overwhelm her.

But not all here is sadness and woe. There were also "voila" moments of recognition which caused me to chuckle and add my own associations, as in her essay about a trip to southeast Arizona called "Finding Cochise." I'm not sure how many people today, aside from American history buffs and front-row kids like me, would immediately recognize the name Cochise, but it struck an immediate chord with me, and for the same reason it did with Oomen, because apparently even some girls from that era loved the western movies that proliferated in the fifties. She explains -

"As a child my male heroes were Roy Rogers, because he sang 'Happy Trails,' the Lone Ranger and Tonto, for reasons I can't remember, and my secret hero, Cochise, because I saw a movie in which he appeared in all the ways we would now perceive as politically incorrect ..."

This single line dropped me back into the air-conditioned darkness of the Reed Theater nearly sixty years ago, munching my popcorn as I followed the Technicolor saga of Indian agent Tom Jeffords (James Stewart) and his uneasy alliance with the war chief, Cochise, played by dusky-skinned actor, Jeff Chandler, in the film, Broken Arrow. And then my mind skipped ahead to the later TV series of the same name where Cochise was played by an actor of Syrian heritage, Michael Ansara. And speaking of Tonto, Anne-Marie, Jay Silverheels had a featured role in both Broken Arrow and its film sequel, Battle at Apache Pass. And while we're talking cowboys and Indians, if you and David had continued just a few more miles NE from Cochise, you would have come to Willcox, the home of "the last of the silver-screen cowboys," Rex Allen, where you could have visited The Rex Allen Museum.

Okay, I know I'm pushing the parameters of what constitutes a review here, but I had my raggedy old Rand McNally out, as I always do when reading about far-away places, and there was Willcox staring me in the face. How could I not mention this? There might be some other old buckaroos and cowgirls out there reading this.

And just to keep the record straight, I DO recognize that "Finding Cochise" is about more serious things than cowboys and Indians. I will, however, let other readers discover that for themselves. But while I'm at it, here's one other mostly irrelevant comment about another essay, "Squall," which might serve to embarrass Anne-Marie at least a little. In this piece about fly-fishing, Oomen is visiting her two adult sisters in Colorado, and, in a most uncharacteristic manner, she manages to use that four-letter word for manure at least four times in less than a dozen pages. It must have been something about being with family again that took her back to her farming roots. Her always practical mother, she tells us in a later piece, used to tell her children matter of factly that the smell of manure shouldn't ever bother anyone; that it simply "meant everything was working."

A piece called "The River Inside (A Prose Poem)," with its ruminative stroll through an old church graveyard along the Huzzah River in Missouri, struck sparks of memory within me of a classic prose poem I studied eons ago in college, Edgar Lee Masters' SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY.

Perhaps my favorite piece of the whole collection is the one called "Finding (My) America," in which Oomen travels to four different small-town libraries in northern Michigan as part of a book tour. She identifies herself as "a nerd for valuing books, for reading them, for loving to hold them, smell them and turn their pages, for revering the places they take me, as well as the places they are housed."

Me too, Anne-Marie - book nerd extraordinaire.

It occurred to me as I was holding this particular book, smelling the ink and the glue, turning the pages and examining the cover, that the author's name forms an interesting acronymn - AMO. In Latin, "amo" means "I love." And, if you look closely in this collection of essays, you will find, tucked here and there, a continuing and intimate love letter to Oomen's husband of many years. In the end, for me AN AMERICAN MAP is a book that is dense with associations and filled with impeccably beautiful prose. In case you haven't guessed it yet, "I love" this book.

An American Map is a collection of essays by Anne-Marie Oomen about and inspired by particular spots across America. It is more memoir than travel guide, as Oomen writes less about the facts of a place than what she thinks about when she is there.

Her words are beautiful and she writes with poetic flourish with phrases that describe a cabin retreat that “eddies with chill” or a waterfall with “the look of a million feathers tipped to catch the force of motion.” Her essays inspired by hikes on the Appalachian Trail and to the top of El Yunque in Puerto Rico are particularly lovely.

Readers who may find Oomen’s prose a little too purple for their tastes will enjoy the more action-oriented essays, like “Squall” about learning to flyfish with her sisters in Colorado, or the title essay about going to New York city to promote a documentary about Michigan asparagus farming.

Book lovers and writers will enjoy “Finding (My) America” in which Oomen describes her thoughts and experiences while on a mini-book tour to small public libraries in rural Michigan. In it, she examines the importance of books and reading and discusses the community between authors and readers:

I sense that when I am reading [aloud] or being read to, if it is done with skill, the energy shifts and flits between the reader and the read to, and evolves into something just short of reading each other's minds. Do a group of people all listening to the same story -- a story that has taken them not to spirituality like a prayer might, but to the internal realm of imagination where all of us, through language, enter another world -- create a unity there, in that place, that we find in no other communal experience?

It is this way Oomen has of bringing a big idea out of a simple experience that makes traveling through her essays so pleasurable.

Also posted on Rose City Reader.½

Anne-Marie Oomen is a poet. I haven't read her poems, but I do know she is a person of rare sensitivity with a reverence for language and the spoken word, because I have read her memoir of growing up on a farm near Hart, not far from the shores of Lake Michigan. From the very first lines of Pulling down the Barn, I could "feel" the poetry. Listen.

"She is an old hill of a woman, leaning against the sewing machine, singing softly in a language I cannot understand. Her once ample body slopes from the shoulders down, inclining into drooping breasts and folds of stomach. Her hands are as faded as late fall, her skin loose and fissured as a poor field."

In this description of her earliest memories of her dying grandmother, Oomen sets the tone for her story, a tone of wonder and awe and a firm connectedness to family and to the earth that nourishes us all. A strong religious upbringing too is entwined throughout her tale. She speaks of farming as "an unspoken religion... each crop shaping a gospel," and fields which "speak a liturgy" and "are our gods." Barns become "the cathedrals of farms."
This pantheistic thread, which could be off-putting and troublesome in the hands of a less skilled writer, works wonderfully for Oomen and serves to stitch together all of the small, exquisitely crafted essays that make up her story.

The eeriest thing for me about Oomen's memoir, however, was the absolute ease with which I could relate to nearly every small vignette of family and farm life. Have you ever heard the phrase, "We went to different schools together?" Well, that's how it felt for me as I eagerly devoured this book.

Let me try to explain. Oomen describes the sensation of the first time she had the wind knocked completely out of her after falling several feet onto the barn floor from an improvised rope swing between the haymows. She tells of the pain, the panic: "I cannot breathe. I know that I have died."

The same thing happened to me when I was about eight. Playing hide and seek with my brothers in the dark around our cabin on Indian Lake, I ran full force into the edge of our brick chimney. I still remember that fleeting feeling of panic, the inability to breathe, the sudden real fear of dying.

Another example: She tells the story of her brother's horrific winter accident on a toboggan which left him with two broken ribs and a ruptured spleen and necessitated an emergency trip to the hospital and caused untold trauma to her parents. When I was twelve, a gruesome sledding accident tore open my leg. I needed over thirty stitches and was out of commission for months.

She tells several stories about her fiercely competetive brothers, Rick and Tom, and how they were always trying to outdo each other, often engaging in the infamous "double dog dares" once ubiquitous to childhood. One of these angry confrontations left Rick with a permanent scar on his forehead. I too have a small crescent shaped scar in the same place, the result of a rock thrown carelessly by my brother.

There are too many eerily common experiences like this for me to name here - stories involving chickens, cats, and cows: haying, hunting and harvesting - but perhaps the most striking coincidence for me was that both Oomen and I "tried on" a religious vocation in the ninth grade, she at Marywood Academy, and I at St. Joseph's Seminary, both in Grand Rapids. We were, it seems, both sabotaged by the same weaknesses - homesickness and a healthy interest in the opposite sex. She was undone by guilt-wracked daydreams of Napoleon Solo, I by pubescent fantasies of Annette and erotic images of virgin martyrs. Loneliness, celibacy, and strict obedience were simply too much to ask of normal fourteen year-old kids plagued by raging hormones.

All of these examples are not meant to suggest that Oomen and I are so very much alike. In fact, I strongly suspect that the opposite is true. But her story will certainly strike a common chord in almost anyone who grew up in a small town or rural setting and her style is easily accessible.

Currently the Creative Writing Chair at Interlochen, Oomen did leave the farm, of course, but she has never forgotten it, and doesn't hesitate to recognize its importance in who she became.

"I love how these fields make me, how the weight of the farm work shapes my being, how the rich liturgy of sounds... echoes through the cells of my body even as my brain learns with equal clarity that I cannot belong here."

Pulling Down the Barn may be filed under memoirs, but its precise and beautiful prose is proof positive that Anne-Marie Oomen is, and will always be, a poet. Try reading passages aloud and you will "hear" the poetry. This is a beautiful book, a small gem of storytelling.