Time and Other Solvents: A Story of Healing, Told in Poems

Claudia Gary, Sligo Creek, 2026, pb., 96pps., £12.99

VADIM KAGAN finds very personal echoes in a fine new collection of verse

Full disclosure: Claudia Gary is my teacher. I mention this upfront, because it shapes my approach to Time and Other Solvents – a poet reading a poet, with the personal connection inevitably influencing the process. Poetry can obscure as easily as it reveals, which is why it takes courage to turn it on your own life. Gary does exactly that, across eighty-plus poems and a whole life, in forms ranging from the villanelle to the sonnet to free verse. It is one of the most honest books I have read in years, and one of the most charged.

The collection is organized as a triptych. Part I traces a childhood in New York and elsewhere, filtered through art, music, a brilliant and damaged mother, and the first intimations of loss; Part II follows the speaker through the joys and pains of adolescence and young adulthood – asserting her space, a marriage and life abroad, another marriage, pregnancy, and an off-and-on background of eating disorder; Part III moves into a hard-won adulthood – grief, recovery, the death of parents, and the return to (and through) art. The title says “A story of healing”, and it is not a marketing phrase. It is a precise description of what the book does and how it works.

I admire Gary’s command of form. The sonnet ‘Perfect Time’ splits cleanly into two numbered sections: the first a subway ride with her mother, the second the mother’s psychiatric hospitalization and ECT, which Gary names in a footnote with clinical plainness: electroconvulsive therapy. The second section opens: “Perfect time’s up. A brittle stick of chalk, / you’re quivering, sobbing, packing for somewhere.” The same rhyme scheme, the same fourteen lines – but the mother who was singing is now shaking and being packed off to a clinic. Gary doesn’t explain the gap. The form does it. It is notable that the first part is an uninterrupted block of text, while the second one is broken into stanzas – somehow adding to the difference between the childishly joyous stream of thought and brittle, uncertain reality of a clinic. The villanelle ‘Getting Lost’ ends: “Patterns of bricks, words, music, inexhaust- / ible in variation, began oozing / out of that childhood dream once double-crossed. / I found myself through fear of getting lost.” That fear becomes the reason to write.

The mother is the centre of the book, and Gary gives us time to understand that relationship. The mother was an artist herself – a maker of mosaics, a repairer of picture frames, a woman who guided her daughter’s hand across the paper. She was also someone whose own mind had been damaged by the very treatments meant to mend it. In ‘Her Memory,’ Gary says: “Mom was a blessing once, / a vibrant tapestry, / until they took away / her woven synergy. / Although her inner strength / turned into cruelty, / her earliest bright stitches / dance through my memory.”

That the mother who could receive half an embrace before pulling back, who could call her clinging child “sticky chewing gum,” who retreated from half an affection, also taught that same child to see the world – this is the contradiction the book is built on.

Part II turns personal. The eating disorder is present from ‘Empathy’ through ‘Bulimia’ and into ‘The Spill’ – shown, named, and examined. A poem addresses Princess Diana directly, noting they shared a hushed disease before it had its public name. ‘Desserted’ is about chocolate the way addiction is about the substance – not really. ‘Wrong-Way Driver’ uses a near-collision on a dark road – a wrong-way car narrowly missed, the baby in the back seat sleeping through it – to ask whether a brush with death is enough, or whether the will to live has to come from somewhere else. ‘The Cure’ takes that question head-on: the speaker has been told real illness demands a real cure, not an imagined one. The final couplet doesn’t argue – it just states what is true: “You have been cured by friendship, words, and song.”

Part III is about losing the people who made you. The father who walked through the Brandenburg Gate just after the Wall fell, who had once been a billboard face for bourbon in cities the daughter never knew; the mother who, near the end, ran her fingers through her daughter’s curls and apologized for straightening them chemically decades before. ‘Barrier Reef’ returns to that childhood subway ride and what the mother tried to teach there – and finds that something the speaker once refused has finally come through. The poem ‘Marathon’ holds the mother’s dying with quiet control – its returning lines carrying the long duration of dementia, until her last words turn out to be about airline ticket prices, and then she is gone. The quietly intense poem called ‘In the Cellar’ gives the collection its name – stories kept in airtight vessels, agitated from time to time, until one day they appear “translucent.” The poet asks: “Will I someday grow old / enough to speak of them?” The book itself is the answer, and it took decades to get there.

I come to Gary’s work as a poet myself – someone who has spent years wrestling with formal verse in two languages and knows what it takes to make a form work rather than merely contain. What I find here is something else I aspire to: an image that carries more weight than an argument. ‘Skating Lesson’ ends with one: “Under the frozen surface of a pond / was a baby. I ran to break the crust, / and found the child alive. / From this dream I gathered, / Yes, have children. / The message had a hibernating twin: / Ice will revive you.” It’s the most quietly hopeful image in the book.

I also understand many of the losses Gary writes about – not the same losses, but similar in shape and scope. The distance between a parent’s aspiration and their capacity for presence. The experience of arriving in a foreign country and learning to live inside another language. The way poetry and music are not escape routes so much as load-bearing walls, the things that hold you together while you figure out how to hold yourself together. Reading Time and Other Solvents felt, at many points, like being recognized by a stranger – which is perhaps the best thing a collection of poems can do.

The book ends with ‘Comfort Food,’ a short poem that manages to be funny and devastating in equal measure: lentils, barley, split peas, water, salt – the recipe is simple, almost nothing, and then in the third stanza, with no warning: “Towers have toppled / into the soup.” A poem can do that – fold the catastrophic into the domestic without irony and without sentimentality – only if the poet has earned it by paying attention, poem after poem, to things that hurt. Claudia Gary has earned it.