The Pattern Maker's Daughter: Poems

On The Pattern Maker's Daughter

It's not easy to write narrative and lyric poems that are individually strong and also coalesce into something more than themselves--a "third body" as Robert Bly has argued. But Sandee Gertz Umbach has done such with her heart-intelligent poetry in The Pattern Maker's Daughter. Umbach employs a woman speaker who unsentimentally looks at (through the particular lens of epilepsy) the people and neighborhoods in the hardscrabble mill town of Johnstown, PA. Most importantly, Umbach's poems reveal how the geographic and geological landscapes have put this town in a precarious position, isolated and prone to many disastrous floods. By the book's end, we truly care about the plights of the families in Johnstown, the ones that have been able to endure the unpredictable power of nature and those who, sadly, were swept away by that power.

Her poems remind me of that Robert Frank's classic, haunting photograph of gauzy curtains blowing in a window that overlooks a grimy mining town, a town like Johnstown, where beauty blends with boredom, and desire is wedded to entrapment.

-Thom Ward