Anne-Marie Oomen is a poet. I haven't read her poems, but I do know she is a person of rare sensitivity with a reverence for language and the spoken word, because I have read her memoir of growing up on a farm near Hart, not far from the shores of Lake Michigan. From the very first lines of Pulling down the Barn, I could “feel” the poetry. Listen.

“She is an old hill of a woman, leaning against the sewing machine, singing softly in a language I cannot understand. Her once ample body slopes from the shoulders down, inclining into drooping breasts and folds of stomach. Her hands are as faded as late fall, her skin loose and fissured as a poor field.”

In this description of her earliest memories of her dying grandmother, Oomen sets the tone for her story, a tone of wonder and awe and a firm connectedness to family and to the earth that nourishes us all. A strong religious upbringing too is entwined throughout her tale. She speaks of farming as “an unspoken religion... each crop shaping a gospel,” and fields which “speak a liturgy” and “are our gods.” Barns become “the cathedrals of farms.”

This pantheistic thread, which could be off-putting and troublesome in the hands of a less skilled writer, works wonderfully for Oomen and serves to stitch together all of the small, exquisitely crafted essays that make up her story.

The eeriest thing for me about Oomen's memoir, however, was the absolute ease with which I could relate to nearly every small vignette of family and farm life. Have you ever heard the phrase, “We went to different schools together?” Well, that's how it felt for me as I eagerly devoured this book.

Let me try to explain. Oomen describes the sensation of the first time she had the wind knocked completely out of her after falling several feet onto the barn floor from an improvised rope swing between the haymows. She tells of the pain, the panic: “I cannot breathe. I know that I have died.”

The same thing happened to me when I was about eight. Playing hide and seek with my brothers in the dark around our cabin on Indian Lake, I ran full force into the edge of our brick chimney. I still remember that fleeting feeling of panic, the inability to breathe, the sudden real fear of dying.

Another example: She tells the story of her brother's horrific winter accident on a toboggan which left him with two broken ribs and a ruptured spleen and necessitated an emergency trip to the hospital and caused untold trauma to her parents. When I was twelve, a gruesome sledding accident tore open my leg. I needed over thirty stitches and was out of commission for months.

She tells several stories about her fiercely competetive brothers, Rick and Tom, and how they were always trying to outdo each other, often engaging in the infamous “double dog dares” once ubiquitous to childhood. One of these angry confrontations left Rick with a permanent scar on his forehead. I too have a small crescent shaped scar in the same place, the result of a rock thrown carelessly by my brother.

There are too many eerily common experiences like this for me to name here – stories involving chickens, cats, and cows: haying, hunting and harvesting – but perhaps the most striking coincidence for me was that both Oomen and I “tried on” a religious vocation in the ninth grade, she at Marywood Academy, and I at St. Joseph's Seminary, both in Grand Rapids. We were, it seems, both sabotaged by the same weaknesses – homesickness and a healthy interest in the opposite sex. She was undone by guilt-wracked daydreams of Napoleon Solo, I by pubescent fantasies of Annette and erotic images of virgin martyrs. Loneliness, celibacy, and strict obedience were simply too much to ask of normal fourteen year-old kids plagued by raging hormones.

All of these examples are not meant to suggest that Oomen and I are so very much alike. In fact, I strongly suspect that the opposite is true. But her story will certainly strike a common chord in almost anyone who grew up in a small town or rural setting and her style is easily accessible.

Currently the Creative Writing Chair at Interlochen, Oomen did leave the farm, of course, but she has never forgotten it, and doesn't hesitate to recognize its importance in who she became.

“I love how these fields make me, how the weight of the farm work shapes my being, how the rich liturgy of sounds... echoes through the cells of my body even as my brain learns with equal clarity that I cannot belong here.”

Pulling Down the Barn may be filed under memoirs, but its precise and beautiful prose is proof positive that Anne-Marie Oomen is, and will always be, a poet. Try reading passages aloud and you will “hear” the poetry. This is a beautiful book, a small gem of storytelling.

 

Tim Bazzett is the author of Reed City Boy and Soldier Boy. His third volume of memoirs, Pinhead, is an account of his student years at Ferris State, and will be published later this year. http://www.rathole.com/reedcityboy