Bayonet Woods as a Sequence

Kate Litterer here. I just finished up Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods and I have to say that the back cover's description of it as "a kind of mystery novel" was pretty apt, not necessarily because the collection had a progressive plot and denouement, but because of the character's development through Bohince's ordering for the poems. All of the collections we've read thus far told one speaker's voice (even though CWBK hosted other speakers, i.e. the Chisums, it centered on Billy's story; IEBW also hosts a few others' voices, i.e. farmhands, but centers on the speaker's story).

The speaker seems to me like a grown woman who describes her childhood through an adult's memories, using words that might not have been accessible to a young girl but are through an adult's vernacular. The use of the young girl's view of the world is instrumental to the collection, as even when the book nears its end, a tone of fear or abandonment or powerlessness exists. An example of the adult voice/child memory take place in "Landscape with Sheep and Deer", page 4:

I remember the arrhythmia of their movement
across the drenched pasture,
stuttering by my father would say.
What I'm trying to say is remote as a cloud
passing through woods, his face
in a window above the pen,
a clot of feeling. (1-7)

While the girl speaker has intense emotions of grief and pleasure, she most probably wouldn't say "arrhythmia," and the line "What I'm trying to say is [...]" makes me feel that the speaker now vividly remembers her childhood spent beside her father. This makes her loss of her father striking; she misses him tenderly and remembers many seemingly insignificant things about their life together. I agree with some who have already posted on Bohince: her diction is precise and allows her to create a tone of twistedness or grotesque discomfort, even when she discusses softer objects, like sheep or family. That precise voice and clarity of detail showed me that the speaker must be the now older, more mature daughter, and because her feelings of loss and loneliness continue to throb in the present, through the poems, I couldn't resist reading it through in one sitting to see if she finds solace.