Dream House: A Poem

A long poem in six sections, Dream House takes its cue from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space in its investigation of female embodiment, calling up such feral, liminal spaces as the pregnant body, the aging mind, snail shells, broom closets, low-ceilinged pubs and abandoned pizza boxes. Part Tardis, part townhouse, part Howl’s Moving Castle, this wry, surreal and many-peopled narrative interrogates what metaphor might hold of history, both personal and social, after a mother’s passing. Its migrant speaker trawls through hedgerows and recipe books to unearth stained birdsong and undead civil wars, tracing a matrilineal path across four generations while traversing the haunted margins between existence and belonging.

Cathy Stonehouse’s Dream House, like any magical dwelling, is not what it at first appears to be. Walk inside. Explore its rooms. It is larger and more expansive than you might think. Also stranger, more peculiar, idiosyncratic. It is a metaverse of possibilities, the locus where what is lived intersects with what is imagined. As Stonehouse herself puts it, “The house is a cocoon, an open coffin. It is full of weather, and changes / every time you dare to look.” Open the door. Close your eyes. The operative word is not house but dream. Look around. You are already there.

“In Dream House, Cathy Stonehouse trips the latch to a secret door, exposing a network of hidden passages ‘shiny with private meaning.’ Amidst the very real furnishings—tea towel, ceramic hen, nursery rhyme, commemorative plate, a mechanical contraption for slicing eggs—these shifting interiors bewilder and estrange until ‘everything has been refurbished.’ This book is an enchantment, conjured by an imaginative and deeply original poet who knows intuitively that ‘what matters when transcribing are the elisions…’”