The Boiling Point for Jam

The Boiling Point for Jam, by Irish writer Lynda Tavakoli, is a debut with the scope of a new and collected. Like a modern Angel of History, the speaker in these poems observes how “the past becomes the present / and the present loiters somewhere in the past,” how even as we move, inexorably, into the future, our perspective remains locked in remembrance. 

In “Dead Dog,” Tavakoli utilizes the second person to draw the reader temporarily into the role of the speaker’s mother who is experiencing memory loss, as we learn that “God has forgotten the numbered password / at your door.” Clever line breaks and repetition let us hear loss in action: 

Today we talk of blue dresses and funerals
and how you love my coat, and how
you love my coat, the colour redolent
of something already scudding out of view.

Resisting sentimentality, Tavakoli discovers a strange freedom. A dark sense of humor blooms as the speaker in “What We Waste” sings the Irish folk song “Carrickfergus,” feeling

at peace with an audience
who cannot criticise
or hold the notes in place
for longer than a blink.

In “Kitchen Comforts,” a daughter’s close attention to her surroundings animates each object so that her mother’s unoccupied house comes alive:

Empty jars wheedle their
glass weight into the wood,
its protest stifled only
by the hum of a fridge –
a magic fridge procreating
eggs by the dozen

Elsewhere, childlike experimentation with scale transforms a little bathtub into a huge ship in which two sisters slosh about, “the combined grime of us / tide-marking a plimsoll line around the white enamel.” The titular poem offers a helpful hinge at the book’s center, demonstrating the quiet command of the quotidian: “there is peace in the ordinary: / the boiling point for jam, the quiet release of a latch, / the skirting of his arms about her waist.” Power comes in allowing your attention to clutch common objects, knowing how the mind might drop them.