Review by Carol Ann Wilson
Published in The Awakenings Review, Fall 2025
Celebrating a life infused with nature, beauty and love, Mary Anna Scenga Kruch’s Grace Notes: a memoir in poetry & prose invites the reader to savor these elements of her world as one would a full-bodied Italian wine. It’s an easy invitation to accept as evocative imagery and layered insights tempt one from poem to poem, with narratives interspersed like supportive commas, and popular songs as section titles, their occasional lyrics providing emphasis.
Writing about nature’s lure in “Farm Meditations: Midwinter,” Kruch evokes the joy of discovery in “deer outlines/on beds of decades-old red pine needles . . . under strongly scented branches.” In “Image,” she paints a pair of sleek swans swimming below “rain-draped cypress”, but who do not notice their dual reflections “expressing reverse sides/of themselves like humans/who impart one image/to the world keep another for private study.”
Family threads throughout the book, in shades of vulnerability. From “The Last Word,” which speaks to what will become her sister’s estrangement, “. . . we did not know the depth of my sister’s sorrow,” to “Homecoming: Pofi, Italy,” telling of Kruch’s delight in meeting her Italian father’s extended family, Kruch guides us through a range of familial experiences. Visiting aunts, uncles, cousins, Kruch enjoys the harvests of the farm with its olive grove, pomegranate trees and vineyard, gratified to know “that their arms will open for me when I return.” She meets those “who did not live to see me cross the ocean to find them” through black and white photographs displayed for her.
An early line in the book’s opening poem, “Stereoscope” highlights the opportunity for disappointment: “life played out in shades of gray for my mother, but she longed to view it in colors.” As newlyweds, Kruch’s parents lived with her father’s parents, while that longing to see life in colors led them to work hard and save money to buy a home and travel to all of the national parks. They did save enough for their own home, but three children in a short space of time kept them from the parks. When her father bought her mother a View Master, she could then see those parks in three-dimensions and tell stories about them to her children, which she did with gusto.
A full life includes challenges, and Kruch doesn’t shy away from them. In the section titled “Turn, Turn, Turn,” Kruch holds a steady gaze as she explores the impact of rape by an uncle, telling us in “In and among the Unspoken Year,” “My uncle took a special interest in me, often told me to sit on his lap . . .” She also speaks of physical abuse by a boyfriend, depression, PTSD, shame and loss.
This steadiness is particularly moving when Kruch writes about her husband, who suffers from PTSD resulting from his experiences in the Vietnam war. In “Midsummer,” she writes of a boy drafted before his graduation “who knew his share of blood/and remained fatigued/pin-cushioned in metal.” A prophetic and stunning line, “He was more than his wounds,” tells us not only about her future husband, but also of her ability to see deeply and her willingness to do so. She understands the multidimensional nature of a life, while insisting that joy prevails. Hence the title, for even in troubles, one can find grace notes, and Kruch pens them through alluring poetry and spare, clean prose, signifying that nothing notable be silenced.
Revisiting the Detroit home and neighborhood in which she grew up, Kruch’s “Porches on Springfield Street” conjures the times through references to playing store with her “father’s discarded, wide,/odd-patterned neckties,” dancing “when the radio played ‘Blue Suede Shoes,’” and “reading Little Lulu comics by flashlight.” And, in classic Kruch fashion, she calls to mind the fluidity of time and its passing though “windows broken in houses still standing.” She asks a lone man on the deserted street about the wonderful maple trees that had shaded the front porch. “All gone, he told me. Long gone.”
From Kruch’s appeal to the senses, “grilled cheese/in a fry pan/ hissing brown around the edges,” and “the silence of a splintered table,” to her passion in taking on social issues, “. . . another young black man shot/seven times at close range/in the presence of his children,” Kruch writes with a compelling straightforwardness. At the same time, as with poets Mary Oliver and David Whyte, her accessible writing remains richly layered, complete with those redeeming grace notes.
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