Poets, put your books in the hands of your neighbours' children!
Books | Kathryn Mockler on Upstairs Over the Ice Cream
Poets, put your books in the hands of your neighbours' children!
The first poetry book I ever owned was Upstairs Over the Ice Cream (Ergo, 1979) by Marianne Micros. I was ten-years-old, and she gave me my very own copy. She is not only a poet who happened to live on the street where I grew up in London, Ontario, but also she is the mother of my best friend Eleni Kapetanios. Eleni and I often tagged along with her to poetry readings at the London Public Library or at the Home County Folk Festival or at the parties she and her husband, Tim Struthers, hosted in London, Ontario in the early 1980s.
Upstairs Over the Ice Cream is a raw and moving portrait of Micros’ childhood growing up in Cuba, New York, the granddaughter of Greek immigrants who owned an ice cream factory. She vividly depicts her life in this small American town in the 1950s and the tragedy of her father and grandfather dying in the same summer. She writes, “ i wish i could think about trivia / stop being angry stop smelling death in every flower.”
Amidst the grief there’s humour—her grandmother upstairs feeding birds from the window while watching “a man in the yard below / defecate in the flower bushes” or Micros pulling a prank on one of the factory workers by locking him in a freezer. The man was so scared he crawled onto the conveyor belt. She writes:
good thing it wasn’t moving he would have been part of the next batch the flavour of the month mixed worker and that ain’t strawberry
Micros includes a four-page found poem of her grandmother’s scrapbook which is composed of newspaper clippings:
Hitler’s list of countries
to be conquered — Greece
is next to last
Hitler and Mussolini
arm in arm
HOW TO MAKE AN ATTRACTIVE
WAR-BRIDE HOME OUT OF A
DISMAL RENTED ROOM
easy rice pudding
3,000 GATHER TO VIEW
GIRL’S WEEPING STATUE —
granddaughter graduates
from Sweet Briar College,
1965She observes the harsh realities of the women in her family who after the death of their husbands and sons are “alone” and “unclassifiable” and how their choices even before these deaths were limited.
As a young woman her grandmother was taken from her small Greek village and “shipped off to America” to be married to a man she hardly knew. Her mother told her how she had to “show her bloody nightgown / after her wedding night / live with her in-laws have babies …”
she knew that
a woman’s life is filled with babies
and miscarriages babies and miscarriages
following each other in quick succession
and you have to mop up after yourselfMicros wants something different, and she gets it by going to college and travelling.
In the last poem, she is a college student visiting Sekea, her grandparents’ village in Greece. This is a village without electricity, where chickens roam free, and the people travel by donkey. Despite her initial shock, Micros soon becomes accustomed to life in Sekea where she is under the loving care of her extended relatives—her blind great-grandmother, her great aunts, uncles, and cousins. She learns songs and dances on the beach with a “bearded priest”. A man on a donkey proposes to her.
While she cherishes her time in Sekea, she’s also glad to return to the ice cream factory and her grandmother in Cuba, New York, whom she imagines standing in her “white kitchen cooking / with her electric frying pan” so she can tell her that she “has seen Sekea”.
Upstairs Over the Ice Cream is an intense journey through profound childhood loss, culminating in a discovery of family and self. This is a stunning collection of poems written with sharp, harrowing, and, at times, amusing observations.
I’m so grateful to Marianne Micros for giving me such a rich introduction to poetry with this book and allowing me to tag along to those poetry readings which let me see a world that I didn’t know at the time—would one day be my own.
Upstairs Over the Ice Cream can be purchased from Red Kite Press.
Marianne Micros's debut short story collection Eye was shortlisted for the 2019 Danuta Gleed Literary Award and for the 2019 Governor General's Award for English-language fiction. She is a retired professor of English at the University of Guelph, where she taught Renaissance literature, Scottish literature, folktales, and creative writing. She lives in Guelph, Ontario.
Excerpt from Upstairs Over the Ice Cream
the undertaker has cold, clammy hands as he greets you at the door and leads you inside he smiles with such sympathy this is his salon and he makes his guests comfortable he hangs up your coat and says: don’t forget to sign the guest book before you leave and you breathe a sigh of relief he’s going to let you get away this time he even gives you a gift a ballpoint pen with the name of his establishment printed boldly on it he hopes you will come back someday Printed with permission of the author.
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That is so cool! Nobody would give a 10 year old a book like that today. But I remember roaming the library freely when I was 11, the first year we had a public library.