The Ferry Keeper by Judith H. Montgomery, Reviewed by Carol Barrett

Judith H. Montgomery’s latest collection, The Ferry Keeper, opens with a stunning metaphor that enlightens the entire volume. The poet’s body becomes a ferry transporting loved ones to the other side of this life. In poems that are sometimes piercing in their evocation of shared pain, softened by the celebration of small moments, she traces the journey to care for her parents in their final illnesses––her mother with Alzheimer’s, her father’s decline following a fall. An occasional poem extends the caregiving to a son who has been diagnosed with a terminal illness and to an acquaintance caught in a serious traffic accident. She reflects on creatures in nature, who also must contend with the unpredictable in life.

The churning seas––which lie beneath the poem “The Ferry Keeper”––recur in subsequent images, deepening the work of this central image. In the poem, “Mother’s Day at Aspen Ridge Assisted Living,” we learn that the narrator’s mother slips beneath // a whirlpool of otherness – too far out for me / to reach and pull her back to land. We are told, Her doctors write a raft // of maybe pills. None of these will keep her head / above the waves. The poem ends with this acknowledgement: We try to remember how to wade back to shore. This watery imagery continues to immerse us in the final poem of the collection “Abide,” which addresses the father’s passing. We are told the room drifts like a boat upon a still lake, and I cling to the intimate buoy / of his breath.

Another realm of imagery that informs these poems is the garden. We are given glimpses of the flowers she and her mother tended and come to regard these exquisite blooms with reverence because they represent so much more than their fragrant petals. Various poems lead us to Peace roses, crabapples, Peruvian lilies, Early Girl tomatoes as the narrator reveals, All morning I listen to earth / speak of survival. The garden stirs and buzzes // in a spell of holy tongues, call-and-response (“Still Speaking of Survival”).

The poet leads us through these grounded reflections with room for our own response. Engaging couplets or tercets plot the psychic movement of the poems, so that throughout we are invited to pause, to breathe, to wonder. Nothing is rushed. We are given the time and poetic means to approach that shadow where / all of us must end (“Snake, Shining”). The pacing of the book adds to its gift. The reader too is tended, rather than overwhelmed; invited, rather than pushed.

Winner of the Grayson Books 2024 Poetry Chapbook Competition, The Ferry Keeper is a collection that can not only inspire us as writers to take greater risks with our subject matter and to use images to convey our perceptions. It is one that can enlighten us as we consider the approaching end of life––or completed journeys––of our own loved ones. These poems can help prepare us. They offer implicit coaching in how to get through the shifts in capacity that illness exacts. They yield a graceful understanding of what perhaps we have already witnessed in our own families. It is at once a source of compassion for the larger challenges we may face, and a focused litany of precision in recounting the actual exchanges that mark our closest relationships. As such, it encourages us to be fully alive in each connection that blesses us.