“Today you fell asleep in the car / holding the roses” is one of a handful of unadorned observations in Tanya Bellehumeur-Allat’s new book of poems, striking as much for its beauty as its simplicity. Another one: “All day it’s been Easter.” Days are where we live, Larkin said, and this seems especially true in Bellehumeur-Allat’s poems, where every snowy morning presents an opportunity to resurrect life anew. 

These are poems about the surfaces of that life, a life in a home on a lake, filled with parents and blueberry pancakes, driving lessons and domestic squabbles. Paddling in Maine in summer, cross-country skiing in winter. Bellehumeur-Allat is alert to the household’s rhythms and rituals, the closet with “those haphazard ties, / piled up purses,” and “poems before breakfast / before Spanish homework.” Closer to home, in the village diner, “car truths converge.” 

These are sentimental poems, yes, but the best ones recognize these truths owe something to the mystery beyond, or exist somewhere between the surface and the subterranean: “They say / there are pike nine feet long, as big as sharks / living there, in the eternal dark.”mRb