“Keeping Orchids”
“Keeping Orchids” is one of the signature works of the poet. The title flowers are endowed with multiple levels of symbolic meaning, but the opening lines indicate the most significant meaning. The speaker notes that twelve days after her mother gave them to her, the flowers are still living, but notably, a few buds never managed to blossom open. The unexpectedly long life cycle of this especially fragile species of flower, and the closed buds combine to symbolize the long-term complexity of her birth mother giving her up for adoption and the secrets that her mother continues to keep.
“Dusting the Phone”
This poem is a dramatic poem told from the perspective of a woman who has reached the point of obsessive anxiety over the state of a romantic relationship marked by a recent lack of communication. Desperate to reinstate contact with the absentee lover, the phone becomes a complex symbol representing the failure to reconnect, paranoia about the potential reason for the communication breakdown, and ultimately is even personified into the lover as the speaker confesses to dressing up especially for the phone in order to be ready when its ring announces the long-awaited call is finally happening.
“Gap Year”
The construction of symbolism is a bit different in this poem. Divided into two parts, both have the speaker's son as the subject. The first describes the anticipation with which she awaited his birth, climaxing with the revelation that he had to be forcefully delivered using forceps a week after his due date. The second half of the poem takes place eighteen years later when the son has become an adult traveling around the world during a gap year vacation before heading to college. The imagery throughout this second half of the poem which builds upon a motif in which the son has become the light of her life without which she finds herself suddenly thrust into darkness. The symbolic construction commences with the image of the lights in the hall leading to his bedroom remaining off through the lack of necessity. This image connects directly through the juxtaposition of a picture sent from the other side of the world describing him as “beaming.” References to bright skies wherever he goes and the mother’s love following behind and glowing like a sunrise all conspire to cement this symbolic image of the son as the light of her life which has made her world a little darker in his absence.
“My Grandmother’s Houses”
This poem is a recollection of the speaker’s childhood as reflected through the more experienced eyes of the adult that the child has become. The title of the poem refers both to the second-floor tenement apartment her grandmother called home and to the much nicer high-rise apartments which the residents hired her grandmother to clean. The poem draws to a close with the characterization of her 70-year-old grandmother on the way to a high-rise looking “like the hunchback of Notre Dame.” The literary reference turns the painfully twisted physique of the pitiful character into a symbol representing the harsh conditions under which her grandmother—and countless others just like her—had lived for so long with little to show for all her labor and effort but stacks of old newspaper in her bedroom and a view of a cemetery through her front room window.
“Old Tongue”
This poem opens with the specific qualities of the speaker describing her move from Glasgow to England at age eight as an action that was “forced” upon her. The precise use of that word indicates that the emotional punch the decision packed when she was a child still has the capacity to cause pain. The image of being forcibly moved from the only home she ever knew immediately leads to a recounting of how it almost immediately resulted in the loss of her Scottish accent. The rest of the poem is a recollection of words lost either as a result of falling out of use or alterations in their pronunciation. When the speaker asks readers if they are ever sad when they lost a word and tried to call it back, it is not entirely rhetorical. The question really isn’t about the extended period of disuse of the word, but how the disuse reflects a change in identity. Ultimately vocabulary is identified as an essential symbol related to how one’s identity is constructed and how that identity is subject to alteration as a result of changes in one's vocabulary. The implicit suggestion is that despite having been born and raised in Scotland for the first eight years of her life, the subsequent loss of accent and discontinued use of certain words somehow made her no longer as Scottish as she had once been.
