Mountain Offerings, Amy Allen. Montpelier, VT: Rootstock Publishing, 2024.

Summary: A chapbook of narrative verse capturing memories of childhood, summer vacations in the mountains, growing love, parenting, and loss.

It is a wonderful thing when a writer’s work draws us into a different world than our own and yet evokes analogue memories in our own lives. That’s what I found happening repeatedly in this chapbook of poems by Amy Allen, a freelance editor and writer from Vermont.

We are invited into the world of Vermont, a state I’ve only driven through. One of her early poems even celebrates folk singer Noah Kahan’s unofficial anthem (I had to Google it!) for Vermont and the weird love we can have for our home state–maybe not so weird. She celebrates both its obvious and subtler beauties in “Pilgrimage.” There are the memories of arriving at a summer cabin in June, with all the summer ahead, and early winter sunsets over Lake Champlain after which “The stars shine brightest/on the coldest of days.”

We have a young couple sharing a “Tiny House” in mud season or climbing a mountain together to the summit and a knowledge of each other forged “without ever touching.” In “Gathering,” the couple watches their daughter gather pine cones while studying one together. Later she finds he has left one on the bedstand as she slides under the covers next to him. A couple of poems remember what seems to have been their daughter in a serious medical emergency–a greenhouse that gave respite and the implied understandings in family lounges. “Daughter of Mine” captures the moment one realizes the transition of the daughter toward adulthood, toward being her own unique person, a marvel and a mystery.

Allen traces the seasons of life, including the cleaning out of a parent’s house in “My Mother’s Flowers.” She describes “Heavy-lidded casserole dishes/cookbooks with margin notes/penciled in her cursive/framed photos of ourselves/leather handbags we’d given her on birthdays/three unopened jars of her face cream/I wondered when I’d forget that smell.” Many of us, if we reached a certain age, carry memories like this.

Sure, these poems evoke memories from childhood summers to flirtations and deepening loves, to the joys and heartbreaking moments of parenthood. She calls to mind those special places of our lives. More than this, she reminds me, in the words of Mary Oliver of our “one wild and precious life.” In most of the poems we remember analogues from our own lives, but in “Hope is a Voice” she reminded us of our shared experience of the dark days of January 2021 and the moment a young woman in a yellow coat invited us to step toward the light as she reminded us of “the hill we must climb.” In Mountain Offerings, Amy Allen reminds us in times of innocence, wonder, sadness, intimacy, and hope of all that is precious in our passing lives.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book for review from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program.