RED HOUSE

Poet Messer spins the life story of her childhood home in a handsome voice often eerily lost in reflection.

Nonetheless, this is a document of history, and this is a house with a long one, starting in 1647 when Walter Hatch made a small purchase of land in Marshfield, Massachusetts, and built a structure with wattle-and-daub chimney, thatched roof, and oiled-paper windows. Members of the Hatch family lived there for nearly 300 years, enduring many winters during which they “stood scorched-faced before the fire, while the rest of the room to their backs filled with frost.” In 1965, the author’s father bought the Red House, and she grew up there. Messer (Poetry and Creative Nonfiction/Univ. of North Carolina, Wilmington) elaborates the calendar of her days in and with the house, layered like a parfait between chronicles of the earlier inhabitants, who had left a rich paper legacy. Messer’s recollections sometimes feel as hoary as those of the Hatches: she speaks of her father tying tinfoil bows on the fruit trees to scare away hungry birds, so that “the whole yard shook with the soft tinkling of the bows and spots of light”; and when she spied on her sister playing the piano, “I would lie down and peer through the cracks in the floorboards where I could see her hands moving over the keys, feeling only the thin space, the board, between me and the room below.” Even the aftermath of a terrifying fire that decimated the building in 1971 is described with a poet’s lyricism: “Entering a burned house was like entering a dream mind—some elements were missing entirely or moved to other locations, the rooms the same but clouded, slightly off.” In a good way, much like Messer’s prose.

Another revitalizing breath to sustain the Red House in its long odyssey.