Internationally acclaimed author Carolyn Gammon conjures a kind and unflinching portrait of her mother’s memory loss—ultimately revealing the love, joy and life which remain even as memory fades.

Learning to speak in maybes—perhaps I told you? Were you there?—and to let a mother direct memory as memory vanishes, Gammon threads a path through time, bringing us into the heart and heat of a mother-daughter relationship that is changing as each day passes. That one day, may not offer “the pleasure of a daughter’s company, but only that of a warm hand.”

Each poem reveals the intimacy of this mother-daughter relationship, thrusting the reader into their dialogue and communication. At the end of each poem is a quote from Gammon’s mother, often eerily insightful, reflecting her own youthful ambition to write: “I am still clinging to the vine” and “I find forgetting easy.”

Kind, often funny, and always honest, this collection is for anyone who has loved someone who is beginning to forget; has forgotten; but will not be forgotten.

These words offer an archive; a testament to the memory that lives in books—and a reminder that memory loss is not an insurmountable barrier to living a good life.

Born and raised in New Brunswick, Carolyn Gammon moved to Berlin in 1992. Her poetry, prose, and essays have appeared in anthologies in North America and Great Britain, and in translation. She is co-author of the Holocaust memoir Johanna Krause, Twice Persecuted (WLU Press, 2007).

Israel Unger was born in 1938 in Tarnow, Poland, and immigrated to Canada in 1951. He is Dean Emeritus of Science at the University of New Brunswick. Israel Unger was one of fifty Holocaust survivors to be honoured by the Government of Canada in 1998 in connection with the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He was the educational advisor for Atlantic Canada for the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies.

Carolyn Gammon's profile page

"With her mother’s declining health and rewiring circuitry of memories, Gammon draws us in. Her poignant narrative poems evoke their lives together over the decades in nonlinear fashion accompanied by her mother’s pithy, unpredictable one-liners at the bottom of each page. This is poetic narrative undone, rediscovered, and re-imagined.”

Betsy Warland, author of <i>Bloodroot: Tracing the Untelling of Motherloss</i>

“Carolyn Gammon’s sensitive poetry tells the story of her mother’s life, with the emphasis on her last years with failing memory. Frances Firth Gammon was a remarkable woman, and the relationship between her and her daughter shows that personality remains when memory fails and deserves to be recognized.”

Eleanor Belyea Wees, ninety-eight years old, long-time friend of Frances Firth Gammon, and co-founder of <i>The Fiddlehead</i>