LETTERS FROM LIMBO (review) .............................................................................................................JENNIFER ROHRBACH

Letters From Limbo Review

Jennifer Rohrbach

In Letters from Limbo, Jeanne Marie Beaumont weaves multiple narrative threads in her collection of poems to create a tapestry binding together past, present, and future. The book is separated into three parts: “Crossing”, “Asylum Song”, and “Holding.” The unknowing speaker explores a family secret that has impacted her entire life, and suggests that the past inevitably crosses into the present and future. The family secret is the focal point of the “Asylum Song” section while the poems entitled “Letter from Limbo” create another narrative thread. These epistolary poems in the first and third sections are written in a more conversational tone.

The “Letter from Limbo” poems describe a universe, perhaps separate from ours, in which souls are suspended. Beaumont alludes to a kind of purgatory where “fires / from the land beyond our border conspire / with unfavorable currents to turn up out heat” (11), yet the residents of Limbo never seem to suffer. Rather, the letter writer describes their perpetual burden, saying, “I can’t escape the something-I-forgot-to-do / sense, that what that slinks over the mind’s / ledge, sinks out of reach” (11). Interspersed between the letters in “Crossing” are ekphrastic poems on pre-1900s pieces of art, many of which depict snapshots in time and portraits of elderly-looking children frozen in stiff positions. These, along with the poem “Old State Asylum: Two Photographs,” set a grim tone for the middle section, “Asylum Song.”

Beaumont mentions in her notes that most of “Asylum Song” is found material. Indeed, many poems in this section cite clinical data, documents from Norristown State Hospital in Pennsylvania, and her own collection Placebo Effects. The speaker pieces together the truth of “Asylum: Case No. 10518” and the details of her grandmother’s death after being placed in a mental asylum in 1927. “Who killed Anna K.?” asks the speaker in “Post Mortem” (52). The potential culprits—nightshade, alcohol, and morphine, among other personified medications—refuse to take or place the blame, nor do the official hospital documents. Instead, the cause of death less than three weeks after Anna K.’s admittance is “Exhaustion from Mental Disease (Mania)” (“Asylum: Case No. 10518”, 35). Utilizing the scarce records available, Beaumont reveals the horrors of mental health asylums in the early 1900s, especially for women, and the frustrations that still haunt family members who might never know the truth about their loved ones’ deaths. In “By Way of Farewell,” the speaker, still searching for answers, pleads, “O tell me, my manic grandmother, / Why your young heart grew weaker and weaker?” to which the grandmother tragically responds, “—It was hope, alas. A lack” (55).

In the last section “Holding”, the speaker brings us into her present and reflects on what she—and we—have learned. She recalls her childhood and how the shards of her grandmother’s death were still buried in her mother, and are now buried in her as well; how she was never told the truth of her grandmother’s story, but “sensed secrets were being held, / heard the hush round certain names, / but it all swirled too remote to matter / to me, terrible daughter that I was / (it’s only now I feel the shame)” (62).

Letters from Limbo ends with a “Letter from Limbo” poem in which the author leaves us with one last piece of wisdom: that there is beauty in the present. In Limbo, wherever that might be, its residents find comfort in unfulfillment and have discovered their truth. If we interpret the author of the letters as Anna K., we can find comfort in the fact that the life she now lives might be more than the emotional limbo she was living on earth. The author writes in the first letter of “Holding”:

If granted reprieve, some of us argue

We’d refuse to leave. Isn’t this the best

Of circumstances? How have happiness

Without hope? How hope without chance of rescue? (59).

The grandmother in “By Way of Farewell” attributed her weakness to lack of hope, and if Limbo can provide such a service, the author reasonably claims, “Immersion in this indefinite haven’s / My sweet sabbatical under the sea” (“Letter from Limbo”, 59). No one knows what life looks like after death. In Letters from Limbo, Beaumont attempts to connect the stories of a woman’s past and another woman’s present to explore a potential future. Ultimately, the poems in Letters from Limbo show us that despite the perils of the past and the uncertainty of the future, we can be content.

Jennifer Rohrbach is a senior English and Creative Writing student at Widener University in Chester, Pennsylvania. She is involved in her campus newspaper and literary journals and won her university's creative writing prize in 2015 and 2016. She usually writes fiction, but has been poetry intern at Philadelphia Stories this spring.