Unfinished Spaces

To read Unfinished Spaces is to catch glimpses of a woman's life, seen through memories that are not always "stubborn puzzle pieces" refusing to fit together, but often full recollections of "mist painting hills on the river's far bank" or "the white birch scraping its branches across the wood." The book makes mention of such present-day events as the visit of Comet Neowise or the war in Ukraine, but usually sticks to the universal and the personal. The poems capture the author's interpretation of life's moments, and the reader may be sure to identify with Susan Hunter's depiction of children who grow and leave empty rooms behind . . . of grandchildren making sense of the world . . . of losses that carry their own poignant memories . . . of dreams that carry memory to another realm.

Reading Hunter's book is like viewing the globe of the Earth from a distance and traveling toward the planet, with its landscape coming into sharper and sharper focus. We see a birds-eye view of "the thread of a road tied taut to a knob of land" and hear "the foghorn moaning out into the night ocean." But it's the smaller spaces that are just as meaningful -- A grandparent's bedroom, a room emptied of furniture after a move, a childhood home still filled with memories of a father's pipe smoke. As some doors close in anger and heartbreak, others open to views of a Caribbean sunrise and "a clear view of blue sky down to the harbor." The doors of memory are always open to creativity and imagination and to the phrase that can be pulled through the eye of a needle.