A Way With Caraway

[wasellajam]

Thanks for coming back, I can’t thank you enough for volunteering to work on this with me (yes, that’s what you’ve done lol). Your critique is clear and thought provoking. Some issues I’d like to discuss:

When we cleared Mawmaw's house
even the closet shelves were adorned,
edged with flat bands of crocheted bells;
originally from Norway, her father lost at sea.

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were adorned, (were) edged - past perfect tense
lost - past tense
was steeped - past perfect tense

Use of pp tenses now makes a link: closet shelves, daughter: reinforced by yr description of daughter as receiver of tea, receptacle. The rest of the verse supports this, focusing on items, things made. Side effect: it could be argued that you’re saying the *daughter* is sleek enameled silver, etc. (would be a pedantic argument, though).

I often get my tenses jumbled, do you think this is sound? I was thinking of adding was, “her father was lost at sea”. Yeah or nay? Is it clear this is Mawmaw’s father?
I was hoping the colon after “tea” would allow the list that follows, is that not working? I added the silver as something concrete to be handed down as the rest is ephemeral.
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Her daughter was steeped in ancestral tea:
sleek enameled silver, intricate
tatting starched into bowls, heavily
salted homemade food laced
with cream, brown bread slick with butter.

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tea steeper, tatting, lace: nice. Calls to mind the hole-y kind of quality the official versions of familial memories have. Kind of interrupted by “slick”, an unpleasant word imo. So do you play with the unpleasant note, or do you replace? “Salted” could be aligned with holes, lace, scattering, if you change from adjective to noun. But speaking past poetic artiface, your lines

heavily / salted homemade food laced / with cream, brown bread slick with butter

make me homesick for my Yiddish-speaking great-grandmother. Her house smell and her painted wooden floors.

Possibilities:

tatting starched into bowls, salt-
heavy homemade food laced

tatting starched into bowls, salt
laden homemade food laced

I’ll have to think on whether salt or heavily is the better break, thanks for making me think about that.

I liked sleek/slick, to me they were both slippery as opposed to harsh, I’ll think on that.
The original:
thinly sliced brown bread
topped with egg and anchovies

got condensed but now you’ve got me missing those yellow rings draped with anchovies, a call back to Norway and the sea. And what about the heart-shaped waffles, the bowl of sour cream batter sitting in the fridge overnight.
You see my problem? lol But thank you for getting airy sieve I was aiming for.


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December heralded the baking marathon,
Alice knocked out a new cookie
every few days for two weeks, stacks
of tins piled high on every surface.

One year, missing some Christmas favorites
her family wouldn't touch, we dove
into a day-long recipe, a loaf of caraway
seeded meat in aspic, the start
of our late month lunches together,

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This poem becomes relentless, two vivid scenes. It’s in motion, a sketch. Is the relentlessness the point of the poem, or does the vividness of the poem as a whole begin to suffer here? You have choices here, when (please not if) you continue to develop this. (I have cravings for aspic roughly every five years, and you remind me it’s due)

So here, the frantic feel of December was intentional, the most insane time to dig up a day long recipe but looking at it now it’s possible the poem would not suffer from the loss of the whole cookie strophe. Gonna give it a try.

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her grinning face lit with youth.
Now the recipe is mine but today, checking
the spelling of Kalvesus, all I could find
was the Swedish Kalvsylta, no caraway.

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her grinning face lit with youth: I love this line.
Thank you for loving this line, I do too and was hoping it worked well enough not to mess with it.

I love this ending, too. It grounds things back. And now, we’re back to the narrator who is a receptacle, too, for their family. And confronting a hole in the lace: a problem. An unusual problem, which is usually what family is good at providing. As the phrase goes, “as is tradition…”

Wondering what you think of the title, too coy?
Sorry to chew your ear off, that’s just me thinking. Again, thanks so much for your time and insight.

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We missed your initial objection to “originally”, it’s possible that line could be cut and the title include Norway/caraway.