Behind Her Eyes

About this picture: Frances Richey with Ben when he was one day old. Taken from her official site gallery.

In a loud and slightly nervous manner, Frances Richey made her way to the small stage in the Macaulay Honors College Common Room. Her unexpectedly tranquil and flowing voice began to guide her audience into the shallow details of her life (where she was from, what college she attended, etc.) Then, as the evening progressed, it dived into the depths of her soul.

Before reciting to us the intimate poems of her son’s deployment to Iraq, Richey gave us a background on what helped her turn to poetry.  Richey lived with her son Ben as a single mother. While he was in high school, she decided that her life needed a deeper meaning. She then volunteered at a hospice and taught yoga in order to find the path through which her life was meant to be traveled, leading to her first poems and, eventually, first book. The Burning Point was a collection of poems about her mother and the processes of life. The Warrior, on the other hand, lashes out Richey’s honest emotions about her son’s involvement in war: an event that threatens life itself.

Richey proceeds with her poem-telling in a chronological manner, beginning with Ben’s graduation from West Point to her feelings while he was in Iraq. In “The Barn Swallows,” Richey abruptly states: “My son is suddenly a man.” In addition to recognizing his growth, she notes how he’s always leaving her. This serves as a perfect transition into “One Week Before Deployment,” a six-piece poem about her exploration into her son’s position before his arrival in Iraq. Out of the three parts she read, her most stunning statement is of her search for her son’s gun among his luggage. Richey describes never seeing her son with one and looks for the gun as she did “a rattlesnake.” Richey continues her gripping momentum with “Kill School,” a description of what her son learned at West Point. Among one of his lessons was one where he was taught to kill a rabbit, which Richey innocently portrays as a baby rocked into a human’s arms then smashed into a tree.

The poetry session ended with a Q&A, facilitated by the students of the Macaulay Honors College. It is here that Richey admits her son’s conflicting viewpoints on politics compared to her own and also where she expresses relief for the “best news of all” (her son no longer being in the military). Her roots in poetry are further exposed when she tells the audience that she “wrote poetry in college…about how life sucks,” and then went into business afterward because she was a single mom. Most of all, Richey states her main position on writing: “Better writing comes when you don’t know how things are gonna end.”