By Kate Fox

In a 1967 interview with Time magazine, Elizabeth Bishop said of the Confessional Poets, who were her contemporaries, “You just wish they’d keep some of these things to themselves.” Having secrets of her own, she kept her own poems cool and distant, cerebral and succinct. What is interesting, though, is that she didn’t use the term “confessional” to describe these poets. Instead, she referred to the work of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, W. D. Snodgrass, her close friend Robert Lowell, and others as the “School of Anguish.” After reading Ron Mohring’s The Boy Who Reads in the Trees (The Word Works, 2024), I would place these poems firmly in that category. 

“Confessional” implies that someone needs to confess—that they’ve done something wrong or shameful. Bishop seems to have sensed that the term was all wrong. These poets weren’t confessing things they’d done; they were in anguish about things that had been done to them: Bullying. Neglect. Homophobia. Physical, emotional, and sexual abuse—and the depression, alcoholism, addiction, suicidal thoughts, and other mental maladies that might naturally result from such treatment.  

Mohring gets right to the point with the first poem in the book. Entitled “Torture,” it sets the stage for other poems that wander through past and painful memories, trying to make sense of them:  

Wait in the car, she says, and lock   
the doors. We pack inside, sticky candies 
in a crushed box. Thirsty. Our bare legs 
pasting together . . .

As children do, an older sibling claims power by taunting his younger brother as they wait for the mother’s return: “She’s taking her time, / he says . . . She’s gone out the back . . . / There’s a robber inside, he’s locking them all in the vault, they’re going to suffocate . . . ”  

Mohring captures both the torture of a child being locked in a hot car and the abuse that passes down from generation to generation, much like the act of suicide passes down from father to son in subsequent poems. The mother has not returned by the end of “Torture.” The younger boy is resigned: “The window’s too hot / to touch. I count the dried, dead bees.” 

In “The Culvert,” the brothers go down to a frozen creek “where a boy from school / drowned one summer, where my brother / leads.” The younger boy struggles to keep up. “I fear the black / water beneath us. I know if I fall through / he will leave and not look back.” 

Other abuses emerge: the sister molested by her father in “Hair,” and the brother’s guilt and shame expressed in “Late  Poem for My Sister,” when she confronts the family decades later. The brother describes the “sudden weight,” the “growing of the burden with the telling. I want to take us back . . . / find a way to get you out. I didn’t. I didn’t know.” 

In “The Surrogate,” the speaker begins: “There were no small sorrows then / only children too small to contain them . . .  // In the photo you are five, maybe four. It had already started.” “It Was Nothing” captures another predatory scene, providing details that belie the poem’s title and emphasizing the blame the boy wrongly shoulders: “ . . . the care he took so natural, inevitable, / and hadn’t I latched onto him, wasn’t this what I wanted without / knowing it?” 

But the worst offenses—because they are cruel and relentless—are committed by a father or stepfather the speaker refers to as “the monster” or simply notes with a blank line in place of the name. His voice rings clear in “Eat Your Peas”: “Goddamn boys. Mark’s gonna be a juvenile delinquent / and the other one’s gonna turn out a fairy.” In “The Humpbacked Trunk,” the man tries to “fix” his son’s “queerness” with a shocking picture of a bare-breasted woman. Instead the speaker  remembers that, as a boy, he “felt desperate, felt nothing, and knew this was wrong.” Toward the end of the poem, the speaker goes back “ . . . to save that boy // from what he will conceal: his shame . . . // I touch his shoulder . . . / Hang on, / I tell him. It’ll be all right. He stares through me, / past the open door . . . Screw them he says. Just screw them all.” 

But refuge and grace do appear in the worst living situations: the white pine tree of the title where the speaker escapes to safety to memorize and recite the “old-fashioned” names of flowers from a book; the owner of a general store who provides the boy refuge “against the needs of the world”; the high school coach who, when the boy gets hurt, offers help with hands that “could touch me and not hurt.” And finally, the truly loving grandfather, who “ . . . would show me how to save the cuttings . . . // Even then I wanted / to be the rose, protected by his care.” 

The dark subject matter is mediated by Mohring’s technical skills and his originality with language. In “That Water,” the speaker, submerged in a bathtub, hears “the echoey plurp! / of each drop from the faucet.” “Trinkets for a Shaman’s Necklace” accumulates a striking list of images: 

Loose eyelet from a shoe. Shard  
of Coke bottle glass. Acorn cap. 
Cat whisker. Gold filling. Marble 
with a bubble trapped inside. 

That last image mirrors the speaker’s plight: stuck like a fly in amber in a dysfunctional family bubble. Finally, in “Holding On,” the realization that “plants have engineered their own survival,” provides some hope that he can do the same. 

Mohring, like most contemporary poets, writes mainly in free verse, using line and stanza breaks to control rhythm and pacing. Many poems in The Boy Who Reads in the Trees are written in couplets or tercets, with stanzas varying to match the subject matter. The couplets in such poems as “The Humpbacked Trunk” and “Cry Box” pair off the same way as the two people in the poems try to discern if their relationship is supportive or adversarial. 

Other poems experiment with traditional forms. “Dead Letter: Pater” is a deftly constructed villanelle. Both “Shouldering His Name” and “The Telling” imitate the fourteen-line sonnet, but ignore the rhyme schemes and the rule that a sonnet’s subject should be about love. “The Telling” veers far from that with its last line: “Tell me this death means something in the world.” 

I would love to read more poetry that, like The Boy Who Reads in the Trees, rejects the externally-imposed term “Confessional” to describe their approach to poetry and instead works to make visible the real anguish and damage caused by the people who truly need to acknowledge and confess what they have done. 
 

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Kate Fox is the author of The Company Misery Loves (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), a collection of poems, and two poetry chapbooks: The Lazarus Method (Kent State University Press) and Walking Off the Map (Seven Kitchens Press). Her work has appeared in Great River Review, Kenyon Review, New Ohio Review, West Branch, Valparaiso Review, and Pleiades. She lives in Athens, Ohio, with her partner, the writer and Steinbeck scholar Robert DeMott; and their two English setters, Katie and Patch.