In the Wake of Memory: Reading Poet Cheryl Wilder’s “Singing Riptide”

Book review and author interview by email

Cheryl Wilder’s new poetry collection, Singing Riptide, opens with a poem that equates learning to forgive with the process of forging steel. She knows both are exacting.

After the rigorous repetition of heat and hammer:

           A figure emerges:
           curved spine; endurant
           strength; wear-resistant edges.
It is the poet.

If you meet Wilder, you can sense her steeliness. There’s also a suppleness, for she is a mother.

Wilder’s language is refreshingly accessible throughout the collection, which also counterbalances the emotional and moral heft of the poems. 

It is a companion to Anything That Happens, which explores the shame that engulfed her after a life-defining event.

“I wanted the book to mimic the all-encompassing feeling of shame and the perception that it will never end.”

In the current collection, Wilder writes about forgiveness, the hardest kind: self-forgiveness.

“The second book provided me an opportunity to look back at the experience through the lens of forgiveness instead of the lens of shame.”

Disarmingly honest and open about personal mistakes, Singing Riptide is one of the most self-revealing volumes you will read.

At 20, Wilder went dancing with a friend and had her first drinks at a bar. When it came time to drive, they tossed the keys between them before Wilder took the wheel, lost control, and hit a pole. She was jailed; her friend awoke from a coma with a permanent brain injury.

These poems don’t sugarcoat or pull punches. The enduring impact of the event is fully confronted in her inner reckoning.

           When mercy plucks sinew and hears
           cavernous echo, it’s not enough to want
           self-worth.

Wilder doesn’t stop there.

The poems are just as much about living, mothering, loving again after a “footnote marriage,” having more children (“Walking my kids / to school—the two from one egg”), and settling into a blended family life.

Abandonment by her father and caring for and losing her mother are also stitched through the verses.

           I dig through whys,

           search for ghost crabs, find Mom’s voice
           saying Dad moved out. I was seven,

           in California, dancing to Madonna
           alone in my room with mirrored closet-doors,

           the spring of my toes touching
           abandonment that is possibility.

A coach and speaker now as well, Wilder didn’t seek therapy until years later because she felt she didn’t deserve to feel better.

“Writing is how I process, so it was my first form of therapy. But, since I didn’t believe I deserved happiness, I didn’t pursue writing with intentionality.”

She went back to college to study poetry.

“For the majority of my poems, a first draft is revised over and over again until I have found the poem’s truth.”

To get to it, Wilder asks, “What does this word mean? What am I trying to say? What is the poem trying to say?”

“During this process, I am, of course, asking myself the same questions. It’s really in the revision, or the making, where I find the most healing.” 

           Where else
           can I find forgiveness
           but in the repetition of pen
           on paper

As one can imagine, Wilder is well-versed in the topics of shame and forgiveness.

“Shame hides us from ourselves, our loved ones, and from showing up. Forgiving myself allowed me to move forward and make space for helping other people by showing up with more presence, compassion, and openness.”

Her free-verse poems thread the two through the narrative, intertwining vignettes from her birth family, her years as a single mother, and later her life with a new husband and twins.

The poet doesn’t ask the reader to look at her trauma; instead, she shows what can come of it. This light and hope runs through the heavy terrain.

Nature, especially in the form of water and gems, such as “Mom’s ashes planted with gladiolas,” is also prevalent and helps to change the pace.

The poems, taken together, build a story of change and becoming, rather than being about isolated moments. This approach gives the reader the sense of a self that has been examined and a life fully realized.

“After the crash, my understanding of what it meant to be ‘good’ or what it meant to live a ‘good life,’ was wiped away, and I had been searching for some truth on how to be an adult ever since.”

It appears Wilder has found it, as some poems and verses move beyond those themes and reflect who she is outside the cycles of struggle and healing.

Clear-eyed and unflinching, deeply felt and considered, Singing Riptide carries an honesty that reveals Wilder to the reader. Reading these poems feels like keeping company with the author, a slow, cumulative unveiling of how she arrived where she is.

           Yes, it is good.
           Yes, it is morning.
           Yes.

Pamir Kiciman is an artist who writes about a range of the arts and the creative process. This reporter can be reached at: Information@TheLocalReporter.press.