The Sheep at the Top of the Stairs

The Sheep at the Top of the Stairs might at first seem an odd title for a book-length sequence that chronicles the poet's widowed mother's steady and irreversible descent into forgetting. But this is also, in equal measure, an act of remembering, remembering not the woman "blunted" by Alzheimer's, but the strong-willed and incandescent personality who was the beating heart of her family's life. In poems that are plainspoken, clear-eyed, and mercifully free of sentimentality and special pleading, Jan Seabaugh reconstructs her mother's history in telling and intimate detail so that we might come to know her as she was. But this is also a book as much about the present as it is the past. When the poet becomes her mother's principal caregiver, mother and daughter meet on new ground and join together in a relationship based on courage and tenderness. In the end, The Sheep at the Top of the Stairs testifies to the power of the imagination to salvage and repair, to mourn and celebrate. Difficult truths burn on every page.

Max Westler, former director of writing programs at Saint Mary's College and author of Civil Defense and Other Poems.