Black Arts & Culture Feature:
Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp
A Yellowed Notebook
by Beth SKMorris
unispeech
March 2025, $19usd, 95 pages, ISBN: 979-8218569662
While mainly a tribute to her father’s memory, Beth SKMorris’ A Yellowed Notebook also fondly (and sometimes not so fondly) recalls the rest of her family as well. Bookended by two haiku set seventy years apart, the poet lovingly reviews her father’s life and the lives he affected. The overweening picture of David Kaplan, her father, is of a confident and caring man deeply engaged in life. A mensch. “December 1951” suggests this in its brief brushstrokes:
snow drifts rise on shore
our skates skim the frozen lake
father, my sentry
He’s consistently portrayed as looking out for his family in these poems. but always even-handed, as in “For the Defense,” in which he defends his daughter against a shrewish ticket-taker at a movie theater and from the school principal who tries to railroad his Jewish daughter in a Christmas performance, while at the same time punishing her when she shoplifts – not with spanking or grounding but by having her apologize to the saleslady and return the stolen merchandise.
At the conclusion of the collection, after we’ve read “the whole megillah,” the final poem, “December 2021,” with its echo of the blanketing snow in the opening haiku, leaves us with the memory of what we have just read, as the poet lights a yahrzeit candle:
matchbox cover closed
candle of remembrance burns
through my window, snow
In an opening note, SKMorris tells the reader about the inspiration for the collection, the discovery of a spiral-bound notebook her father had written in 1977, the last year of his life, a sort of diary. Indeed, excerpts from that notebook are reproduced in the book and serve as inspirations for some of the poet’s work. After an account of her father’s protective impulses in “The Blizzard,” a poem about the 1947 storm that dumped over two feet of snow on New York City and how her father heroically looked out for her, SKMorris cites a passage from her father’s notebook that launches several poems and short prose pieces – “After Siberia,” “Grandpa’s Studebaker,” “The Visitor” and “Genetic Relics” – that develop a picture of the family background and again highlight her father’s protective nature. “Grandpa’s Studebaker” is particularly amusing as she describes her grandfather’s hair-raising driving. After her grandpa dies from heart disease, it ends: “One thing I do remember—my father had to pay off hundreds of dollars in traffic violations Grandpa left behind.”
Though mostly devoted to her father’s memory, A Yellowed Notebook is dedicated to the poet’s late sister Marlene, who figures into many of the selections, including “Big Sister” and “The Whistler” (“My father was a whistler— / pop songs, operatic arias, all / four movements of Beethoven’s Fifth.”), in which we learn of Marlene’s untimely death. “Conspiracy” is a notably funny poem about walking home with her father from ice-skating, the two stopping at a luncheonette and ordering forbidden hot chocolate to warm themselves. The poem ends with her father cautioning: Just don’t tell your mother. Another amusing poem is “Fannie, Fannie, Get Me Out!,” in which her father, an intrepid do-it-yourselfer – almost single-handedly he built the family bungalow, foundation, retaining walls, and all, as recounted in “The Stone Mason” – gets stuck in the chimney flue of the fireplace he is constructing and calls to his wife to rescue him. Meanwhile, Beth and Marlene get a good laugh, “not the only time / the women in his life laughed at his / quixotic projects.” “Dave’s Basement” commemorates his workshop, the jars of nails, bolts, studs. The author of World of Furs, David Kaplan taught in the Fur Program at the High School of Fashion Industries on West 34th Street in New York City. At heart a conservationist and ecologist (“African Small Cats” is a poem about his concerns for feline species threatened with extinction, for their furs), Kaplan’s career took place during the boom and decline of the fur business. Activists objected to the slaughter of animals for their fur, though Dave always pointed out that no part of the mink, for instance, was ever wasted (“The Advocate”). Still, as she notes in an epigraph to a haiku titled “End of an Era,” NYC’s fur district has shrunk from 800 manufacturers in 1979 to only 150 today. The haiku reads:
an untimely death
sometimes saves you witnessing
your life’s work die, too
Poems like “The Jacket,” “A Friend Asks, What’s the Best Job You Ever Had?” and “Brava, Abigail!” celebrate the art of designing fur garments.
The final ten poems in the book address her parents’ decline and summon the implicit grief and heartbreak. “Because” and “Eulogy” deal with Dave’s death and funeral. “They Hardly Knew Him” is a meditation on the fact that his grandchildren will never get to know him, the sense of regret Beth feels. “He Was Steak, She Was Cigarettes” considers the contrasting salt and pepper shakers that her parents were, though devoted to one another. At the end of “Before and After,” when an “elegant man” appears to be flirting with her widowed mother, and Fannie dismisses him, Beth chides her, but Fannie replies, I’ll never wash another man’s dirty socks again. In “Move-in Day at the Nursing Home,” when it has become clear that Fannie can no longer live on her own (even home-aids simply hadn’t worked out), Beth and Marlene try to put a positive spin on the new situation, but –
When I looked back, I watched one
tear slip down my mother’s face.
A prizewinning poet – her previous collection, In the Aftermath— 9/11 Through a Volunteer’s Eyes was a Pinnacle, Firebird and Book Excellence award winner – Beth SKMorris is a skilled writer who is able to evoke a family in brief lines and images. A Yellowed Notebook speaks to all parents and children.
About the reviewer: Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. His poetry collection, A Magician Among the Spirits, poems about Harry Houdini, is a 2022 Blue Light Press Poetry winner. A collection of poems and flash called See What I Mean? was recently published by Kelsay Books, and another collection of persona poems and dramatic monologues involving burlesque stars, The Trapeze of Your Flesh, was just published by BlazeVOX Books.
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