House of Sparrows: New and Selected Poems 

Betsy Sholl

University of Wisconsin Press  $18.95

Reviewed by Issa M. Lewis

Betsy Sholl’s latest collection, House of Sparrows: New and Selected Poems (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), pulls from her previously published books of poetry across several decades: The Red Line (1992), Don’t Explain (1997), Late Psalm (2004), Rough Cradle (2009), and Otherwise Unseeable (2014), as well as several new poems.  The collection beautifully outlines Sholl’s trajectory as a poet, wrapping older poems in the blanket of new.

What makes the collection so striking is Sholl’s ability to connect the past to natural landscapes.  For example, in “The Sea Itself” (115), she writes: 

Here, on solid ground, a blue jay lands,

beautiful and shrill, looking right at me,

banging a seed over and over, as if

he’ll never get it right—another creature

I once crudely dismissed.  I’m sorry

for all my old arrogant thoughts,

for the man who followed me

one whole summer, a grabber, swallower,

a devil in Bermuda shorts. (lines 1-9)

This is only one example of many in the collection where the natural world winds itself up in memory—a lovely grounding, both figurative and literal, giving place even for memories that have come unmoored from their actual circumstances over time.

Even more compelling is Sholl’s speaker’s ambivalence as they ponder the world, the many injustices and indignities.  She writes in “Alms” (135) about an experience the speaker has with a homeless woman asking for money:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Yes,

I gave the dollar.  But I had seven

in my wallet, so clearly that the voice

wasn’t small enough, still someone

else’s sorrow, easy to brush off,

till later that night, in bed, I heard it

again, smaller—miss, miss, little fly strafe

troubling sleep—not a name at all,

but a failure, a lack, a lost chance. (lines 13-21)

The voice Sholl employs in this poem, and so many others throughout the collection, is compelling in its unflinching gaze, yet understated and soft-spoken.  It creates a light touch on even the more difficult subjects she approaches.  

The new poems in the collection, collectively titled House of Sparrows, illustrates this voice beautifully in the poem “Her Story” (6-7).  The female character in this poem has experienced a husband’s betrayal and has recklessly driven her truck off the road while contemplating ending her life.  Sholl’s poetic voice never drifts into the maudlin or preachy; instead, she ends with a gilding of hopefulness:

Come morning, an old man will drive up,

peer in, see all that trouble

and hook up chains to haul her out.

He’ll give her gas enough to get to town,

tell her, Now you never mind, Honey,

you just go on—and she will.  She will. (lines 28-33)

In conclusion, Betsy Sholl’s latest book of poetry, House of Sparrows, is a quiet, yet powerful journey through nature, memory, regret, and hopefulness.  Readers will find themselves returning to its deftly understated voice again and again.

Issa M. Lewis is the author of Infinite Collisions (Finishing Line Press), a chapbook of sonnets telling the story of a rural Michigan town and a four-generation family farm within it. Her work has appeared in Panoply, Linden Avenue Literary Journal, Up North Lit, and Waters Deep: A Great Lakes Poetry Anthology, among others. She was the 2017 runner-up for the Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize offered by Calyx. When Issa is not writing, she teaches composition, rhetoric, and public speaking at Davenport University in Michigan and spends time with her beautiful family in all four seasons of the Midwest.