The Unknown Daughter

Two things came to mind when I read Tricia Knoll’s recent anthology, The Unknown Daughter. One, a collection of poems by Edgar Lee Masters entitled Spoon River Anthology. In his work, a small community comes more and more into focus the further a reader delves into the narrative, each poem written by a different citizen of the small community of Spoon River. Tricia Knoll’s anthology, like that of Masters, is a beautiful collection of free verse poems that also rely on one another. In Knoll’s work, there is a connectedness of voices between pieces that transport a reader to a reality often forgotten: the voices of the unsung, unknown, and uncelebrated. There is an undertone of being watched and perhaps judged as the voices of the “watch women,” neighbors, brothers, and the unknown daughter share their perspectives. One can sense a desperation to break free.

The anthology parallels some of Rebecca Solnits’ Recollections of My Non-Existence as well. In Solnit’s book, written as a memoir, speaking about women, she says, “What’s called for is a resilience of the psyche, a readiness to deal with what comes next.” Indeed, these are twenty-first-century survival skills and Tricia Knoll’s anthology of poems fairly exudes this reality, even behind shrouds of “Complaints of Unknown Mothers” and “The Unknown Tries to Fill in the Blanks.”

In “The Father of the Unknown Daughter,” we hear a plea for understanding by a father who says, “I was an only child of immigrants/who smuggled diamonds in their coat hems./I didn’t know about raising a girl.” He reflects without remorse at having cut his daughter’s funding when she joined anti-war protests. As an added bonus, he says, “I was more polite to her weird husband/than my wife was…”

With each successive poem the reader is drawn more and more into the wider picture of unclaimed voices. The reader hears another perspective in “The Unknown Daughter’s Mother Speaks.” The speaker says, “My daughter tormented Sunday School teachers,/kept asking the one with Parkinsons why/God wasn’t healing her and why/we didn’t go to doctors.” Her daughter disappoints even more as this mother laments “…her fingernails were seldom clean and her hair/was wild. She wasn’t the daughter I’d imagined.”

When “The Unknown Daughter Speaks,” the reader gets a strong sense of the eternal conflict between a neglected child whose parents “liked who they thought I was well enough” and a child who wishes for the strength to claim her voice, her space, her own personality.

This collection of poems is easy to read and enjoyable, even as it paints a picture of uneven personal justice for the unknown daughter. It’s a tale as old as time and one that many readers will relate to. I highly recommend this small book, especially for those interested in women’s studies, women’s issues, and poetry as therapy. Tricia Knoll is a master poet with a keen sense of story.