"Janice Tatter’s Communion of Voices is hauntingly beautiful, resurrecting painful, with words, sounds and imagery that are both real and at times achingly sacred.
In “During the Depression” we hear Locke, the speaker’s grandmother's Black housekeeper: “The only sound in the room/was the swish of the broom, the slap of the mop,/and her hushed low voice chanting the words/of trials and sinners and the glory of heaven,/her head and body swaying in a rhythm/meant for a mourning my mother had never seen, heard.” In “The Emerald Music,” we sit on a pier with the speaker as she remembers her father’s “lilting voice as we walked/this marina years ago when he pretended/one of the boats was his own, naming it/The Emerald Music.”
Voices abound throughout, from “Brother Hal’s radio voice/whose country humor, sometimes/advice in mellowed-out vowels blended/with the smell of sausage or salmon croquettes;” in “Tomboy in the Kitchen,” to the hurtful words from her grandmother in “The Little German”: “Once when I sang the alphabet in German/like my stepmother taught me, my grandmother/yelled, You’re a real German now, aren’t you?/I never understood how my Scots-Irish grandmother/could see pieces of a country sprouting in my veins./I knew Germany was across an ocean but I knew/nothing about death camps or swastikas/or goose-stepping soldiers. I knew my name/Krasselt was German. I knew my father was German/but he didn’t look evil.”
Sometimes it’s not what is said but rather what is not said. In “Little Rock Train Station: 1944,” an unknown soldier comes out of the shadows, and “When he asked for a kiss,/she closed her eyes without thinking.” In “Mirrors,” the speaker’s mother “never asked why I put her gifts/of diamond earrings or charms for a bracelet/in the musical ballerina jewelry box she’d given me/as a child, or why I preferred women friends.” In “Once a Nurse,” “Doctors in white coats/scurried around them and all patients/like generals, accepting patients' silence,/standing by beds, flipping pages of charts,/sometimes walking away without comment,/perhaps a touch on a shoulder.” In “Rain,” “shadows disappear/in summer showers, words vanish/into vapor.”
And yet, what are we to do with all of these voices, these sounds, these silences? As the reader is in communion with these voices and silence, sacred imagery is woven throughout. In the poem that shares the title of the collection, Tatter skillfully shows the holy power of words, moving from “voiceless shadows” to “whispers rising in salvation.” And this movement parallels the movement of the collection, as we move from the unheard to the heard, struggling with both along the way. By the end of the collection, we are left without the human voices and are instead listening to the “slivered phases of the moonlight/that speak to sailors” in “Amore,” “…when you come to yourself/as a stranger in invisible clothes.” And it’s this coming to oneself that has allowed the speaker in “Walking with the Moon” to hear these “gentle waves like hushed words” and “…sounds of stars growing dim,” thereby releasing herself to “no longer tremble with secrets.” And as she lets go of her secrets, she is resurrected.
Tatter’s voice is powerful and profound, yet delicate. As the sacred imagery echoes throughout, we are introduced to the voices of past and present with the haunting familiarity of a shadowy, candlelit sanctuary. And just like a candlelit sanctuary, we are pulled back again and again."
~ Paula Martin Morell, Broken Water
“Communion of Voices is a collection of subtle, fine-boned poetry. The early work evokes a Southern past edged by racism, bigotry, and war; yet Tatter continues with a graceful nod both to the present and to the power of memory.”
~ Leah Browning, editor, Apple Valley Review
“Janice Tatter takes us back to a simpler age of innocence in Arkansas. She dares to expose her heart, and pours out her soul with vivid descriptions of past voices. Janice makes her poetry easy to read as she breathes life into her memories."
~ James F. Marsh, Snapshots of Vietnam
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