“A State of Mind”: a review of Rachel Hadas’ Pastorals by Gretchen Ayoub

Pastorals
by Rachel Hadas
Measure Press (2025)

When I began reading Rachel Hadas’ Pastorals, a richly layered collection of prose poetry, I had a yellow legal pad beside me to write down passages that I particularly loved. I filled twelve pages. Many times I stopped, took up my pen, and said to myself, “I want to remember that.”

There are forty-seven poems in the book, each its own story. Some are a few sentences, others a paragraph long, others a couple of pages. The collection opens with the Vermont family home and its history, artfully drawing the reader into this house—describing the wallpaper, beds, windows and doors—each object holding its own meaning. The doors never fully close, there are many beds, the pink and white floral wall patterns appear in a dream, the views from the windows change with each day and season.

As the book progresses, Hadas pulls us into the surrounding landscape: blackberry patches, muddy hills, and pine trees, all seen through in the “Walking around the Triangle” series, “Meadow,” and others. Home and nature are also embedded into the context of daily life—teaching, drawing and writing—all connected through poetry’s power to heal, comfort, remember, and remind. Hadas slips meaningful quotes from poets and essayists throughout the book; from Shakespeare to Frost, T.S. Eliot to Shelley, and to others who are new to me, but whose names are now written on my legal pad. As a poet and raconteur, Hadas weaves these writers into her stories in a way that flows as seamlessly as her narratives.

I kept returning to one quote as I read and reread the book. In “Dream: On My Knees,” Hadas writes: “This is what it is to live in time, to remember what we can no longer feel, to feel what we can no longer remember. And then it bubbles up.”  What is home? Is it a place, a state of mind, a time where feelings overtake memories, or the other way around?  It’s all of these. The smallest details can be a catalyst for remembering:  food stuffed on the shelves, plentiful books, homemade applesauce, the whooshing of the dryer, the audible sound of bees buzzing on the porch.  The opening poem, “Summer Variations I,” reflects on the elusiveness of time:

“Summer after summer rings changes on the theme of nostalgia—homesickness for
what came before but is still present.” 

“Invisible presences are palpable if not audible here, once the house is inhabited
again.”  

She references Walter De La Mare’s poem “The Listeners,” which she read as a child, wondering about the “phantom listeners,” and finds that (as you’ll find in the collection) history resides within a home; some of it comforting, some less so:

  “A Pandora’s Box of Needs” (“The Old House”)

“A steep and muddy hill I don’t remember having seen before…A house of health and
desolation, of healing and sickness.” (“Dream: The Summer House in Winter”)

“I wander around to the back of the house, which some people call the front.”
(“Hum of the Season”)

“Past summers came and went like the rain, now tempestuous, now gentle as a mist.”
(“Orchards, Medallions, Owl”)

Home is also about the land that surrounds it.  Feelings and memories rise to the surface, prompted by a familiar flower, a sound, a smell, a walk, or an animal.  In “Hum of The Season”:

“That tree where an empty nest is precariously balanced—wedged?—between two branches: family tradition has it that my mother planted a sprouting acorn that she found in Central Park (or was it Riverside Park?) and brought up here . . . The nests built in previous summers remain, still sturdy as far as one can tell, but as empty as unrented summer cottages . . . Lines adapted, scenes reset: resurrected recurrences we recognize, reenact, forget, reenact again.”  

There are gaping barns, pigeons and hummingbirds, stone moss and ferns in the shadows, and a reference to James Merrill’s “Another August.”

“Star and Sweater, Cat and Moon” begins “Though the years are sometimes blurry, the seasons are as reliable as the phases of the moon.”   This is living in time. In “On My Knees: Morning Messengers,” we are reminded of the words of Theodore Kitaif: “Images from our past are quietly but incessantly bubbling below the surface of consciousness, prepared to leap into the light.”

Hadas draws upon her work as a teacher in “Draw a Picture of the Iliad” as she gives her students this assignment.  Each drawing is different; in mythology as in poetry, as in life, interpretation is individual. Helen fills the sky in one drawing, the Greek camp is schematically depicted in another, and Astyanax is crying in another. How do we interpret the events around us? What is important? Who is left behind?

“The Requirement,” toward the end of the book, is an eloquent reflection on the timelessness of poetry as a force.

I thought I was tired of poetry - weary, dry, wrung out or else overfilled, saturated. Possibly even both. The space that should have been devoted to poetry was frozen black or stuffed with chores and fears . . . . And yet. Yesterday, a hundred people or more sat in a big white tent. Through a narrow slit between two tent flaps, the blazing July afternoon, outside was a portal to another world almost within reach. But while the flowery meadow out there burned in sunlight, we in the audience seemed content to stay where we were and listen . . . . To listen to poetry again: breaking through a sticky web and moving toward a big closed chest that had been waiting somewhere out of sight. The chest wasn’t locked, it was simply stuck; it hadn’t been opened in a while. But the sound of voices reading poems acted like a lubricant, and it turned out to be easy to lift the lid.

Pastorals is a tribute to home, nature, the world, family, and how all of these are made richer by the words of the poets, hers and others, woven throughout the collection. There is so much to read here—even reading through the titles elicits the idyllic—“The Fourth of July," "Dreams: Blackberries in Snow,” “Shirley’s Painting,” “Those Flannel Nightshirts,” and “The Scarlet Arrow,” to name a few.  Pastorals is a treasure for poetry lovers but also for anyone who wishes to be transported to a quiet, more reflective time where every object, every moment is detailed in beautiful writing—an invitation to stop, read and imagine oneself in that big white tent on a July afternoon in Vermont.

Gretchen Ayoub is a success coach at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and an editor for MicroLit . She was awarded first place in the Writer's Digest annual competition in the Memoir/Personal Essay category in 2023 and Honorable Mention in the Humor category in 2024. Additionally, Gretchen has published essays for the Boston Book Festival At Home Project, Consequence Magazine (book review), and The Tishman Review. She is currently working on a collection of travel essays focused on healing through grief.