A Way With Caraway

[alonso ramoran]

Hi ella,

A lovely piece. Some word choices I'm not one hundred percent convinced by, but the poem as a whole strongly communicates that warmth that comes with the sharing of food knowledge between generations in families. 

A Way With Caraway (NaPM edit)

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. This stanza, as an opening, does a nice job of characterizing Mawmaw. I'm wondering if the semi-colon might be adding a bit of confusion as to whether the speaker is saying these things that Mawmaw had are from Norway or if she herself is from Norway. Or both, why not. As the poem reads on it becomes obvious, but maybe just having this as its own sentence, as a sentence fragment, would smooth out that initial reading. A small thing to consider.

Her daughter was steeped in ancestral tea: Love this. Steeped=surrounded, by echoes of the motherland
sleek enameled silver, intricate
tatting starched into bowls, heavily Very nice image, love starched
salted homemade food laced
with cream, brown bread slick with butter. Now this stanza is characterizing the speaker, which I appreciate how it subtly does using the language of an outside POV. "Slick" is a word that stuck out to me. I'm wondering if there's a better substitute. It sticks out to me because slick is a word concerning a tactile sense, as in, I'm not touching/holding a piece of toast by the sides I butter. So while it's definitely true that butter slickens the surface of a piece of toast, it's not a sense that should stick out in the memory of eating toast. Typing this out it sounds silly to me but I hope I'm making sense.

December heralded the baking marathon, Why "the" instead of "a"? If it's a recurring thing, maybe a detail to suggest that? Could be as simply as rewording: December heralds the baking marathon
Alice knocked out a new cookie New cookie meaning a different kind of cookie, but batches of em, is my reading
every few days for two weeks, stacks
of tins piled high on every surface. This might be a dialect thing, and thus an irrelevant point since I'm just not in the know, but I'm left wanting to know, tin what? Tin cans don't seem right for cookies. 

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, No comments on this stanza; solid

her grinning face lit with youth. I don't believe grinning is necessary, lit with youth does the work
Now the recipe is mine but today, checking
the spelling of Kalvesus, all I could find
was the Swedish Kalvsylta, no caraway. Beautiful. Makes me think that the caraway was just Mawmaw's thing, which brings more sentimentality to the herb for the speaker 

Thank you for sharing.