The intimacy of home in Mainebased poet’s new collection

“A good house is a used place/ turned over and passed on/ a place of winter noons/ layered like the cemetery/ with strange names.” So writes Maine-based Franco-American poet Jeri Theriault in her latest collection, “Self-Portrait as Homestead” (Deerbrook). These are poems of houses, of the places lived in that live in us, and they draw from Theriault’s upbringing in Waterville, Maine. “Fences tilt toward the river like thirsty horses/ and houses lean/ toward one another shrugging as if to say/ it’s pretty good here. It’s okay.” There’s a resignation here, and a sense, too, of resistance against the reins, of knowing one’s place and wondering, at the same time, what else? What more? Here, the house is the home, the house is the body, and Theriault wrestles with its limits, its timewornness, its continuation in the attics of memory, in the ocean of memory. She writes of the factories where her ancestors worked, where they “inhaled dirt and weed killer,” and about the “stories exhaled” when breathing was dangerous, “all of them makers/ of their own lives.” There’s a force and delicacy to Theriault’s language, a precision of sound and meaning, as when we read the phrase “moth-soft dusk” and know the exactness of the time; in three words she captures its total sensory experience. As a whole, the book, though rooted in a specific time, place, and culture, speaks to the intimate world of our domestic lives. “I want so much from the past and isn’t a house a harbinger/ of future endings?”