This Eye is for Seeing Stars by Christine Poreba
Review by Tatiana Avdelas
Christine Poreba’s This Eye is for Seeing Stars approaches family, self-identity, and movement with the desire for time to slow down just for a bit longer. The collection transports the reader through time as she connects motherhood to her own childhood. Her lyrical wandering freezes time, slowing everything through a recollection of memories and her attention to nature. For instance, the poem “Snow in Florida” speaks to the body containing the past and present:
Stories in the body are forgotten but
accumulate, passing and sometimes returning under streetlights.
like this day with its fleeting snow, which is just another lie like
the Christmas lights, a glimmering hint that brightness might go on forever.
This poem laments the movement of time as she ties her memory of watching the snow fall to her son’s excitement of the shallow snow layer. How she yearns for our smokey breaths in the cold to fog up our windows a little longer. How crunchy leaves and melting plants hold memories of the winter season as spring approaches. Poreba leaves the reader feeling bittersweet by swirling nostalgia with the brightness of the future.
Poreba observes and absorbs to allow the reader into the intimate circumstances that come with being a mother. There is a revisiting of the title “Depot” throughout the collection that reads as a conversation with her son. The use of “you” makes this much more personal and vulnerable but immerses the reader even more. As if we are in these memories. We are the child, mother, nature, the passage of time.
I remember your month-old chest
taped with electrodes
that translated the rhythm
of your heart into a line on paper.
Now you run ahead
and write your name on
sidewalks, marks of chalk
my feet follow.
The emotional weight and tension that a mother faces. The relief she feels following a storm. The eyes in our Florida hurricanes are a moment of calm in these poems. Of course, relief isn’t felt without hardship. But it’s worth seeing the stars. Poreba approaches these moments with lightness and brevity, making them easy to digest as a reader. Reminding us that a mother’s weight is paired with art, musing, and a need to question our movements through life as we experience it.
I am particularly drawn to the narrative voice that holds our attention by tackling different forms, variety in length, and storytelling. Motherhood and a child’s imagination. With its underlying tensions of the loss of a friend and the movement of time through NYC and Florida.
When the plane pulls me away from the city the buildings seem to grow out of the water
and the trees are shaped into boxes of green miniscule beneath the skyscraper
If a plane is carrying you home, are you moving into the past or future? I am brought to this question, and many other musings as I delved into each page. Poreba strategically plays with the narrative and lyrical. She carries us in her pocket as we travel through memories, experiences, motherhood, and place. We become her eyes, we are the aeriel view at times, as she describes the flight of a bird who seems so free but also out of reach.
The bird will begin to answer
the question tugging at its wing
when we are not watching the door,
one open circle with nothing to close.
This Eye is for Seeing Stars is a careful telling of motherhood and affection. Poreba’s gaze in nature, family, self, and time is a movement through poetry that pushes the reader to question their own eyes. A push to look towards the brightness but still hold respect and space for the hardships we all inevitably face.
Stories in the body are forgotten but
accumulate, passing and sometimes returning under streetlights.
like this day with its fleeting snow, which is just another lie like
the Christmas lights, a glimmering hint that brightness might go on forever.
This poem laments the movement of time as she ties her memory of watching the snow fall to her son’s excitement of the shallow snow layer. How she yearns for our smokey breaths in the cold to fog up our windows a little longer. How crunchy leaves and melting plants hold memories of the winter season as spring approaches. Poreba leaves the reader feeling bittersweet by swirling nostalgia with the brightness of the future.
Poreba observes and absorbs to allow the reader into the intimate circumstances that come with being a mother. There is a revisiting of the title “Depot” throughout the collection that reads as a conversation with her son. The use of “you” makes this much more personal and vulnerable but immerses the reader even more. As if we are in these memories. We are the child, mother, nature, the passage of time.
I remember your month-old chest
taped with electrodes
that translated the rhythm
of your heart into a line on paper.
Now you run ahead
and write your name on
sidewalks, marks of chalk
my feet follow.
The emotional weight and tension that a mother faces. The relief she feels following a storm. The eyes in our Florida hurricanes are a moment of calm in these poems. Of course, relief isn’t felt without hardship. But it’s worth seeing the stars. Poreba approaches these moments with lightness and brevity, making them easy to digest as a reader. Reminding us that a mother’s weight is paired with art, musing, and a need to question our movements through life as we experience it.
I am particularly drawn to the narrative voice that holds our attention by tackling different forms, variety in length, and storytelling. Motherhood and a child’s imagination. With its underlying tensions of the loss of a friend and the movement of time through NYC and Florida.
When the plane pulls me away from the city the buildings seem to grow out of the water
and the trees are shaped into boxes of green miniscule beneath the skyscraper
If a plane is carrying you home, are you moving into the past or future? I am brought to this question, and many other musings as I delved into each page. Poreba strategically plays with the narrative and lyrical. She carries us in her pocket as we travel through memories, experiences, motherhood, and place. We become her eyes, we are the aeriel view at times, as she describes the flight of a bird who seems so free but also out of reach.
The bird will begin to answer
the question tugging at its wing
when we are not watching the door,
one open circle with nothing to close.
This Eye is for Seeing Stars is a careful telling of motherhood and affection. Poreba’s gaze in nature, family, self, and time is a movement through poetry that pushes the reader to question their own eyes. A push to look towards the brightness but still hold respect and space for the hardships we all inevitably face.
Christine Poreba, This Eye is for Seeing Stars. Orison Books, August 2025.
ISBN: 9781949039597
ISBN: 9781949039597
