THE TITLE COULD be read as a response to the statement from Freud that stands as the book's epigraph--"The loss of a mother must be something very strange..."--but it is also a phrase in the poem "Everything Bad Is Permanent," where the phrase seems to be shorthand for a period when an infant is taken from its mother to be placed ion the care of another, before being left on its own:
Blank tearful retreat from mother
Mother, Baby. Stranger, Baby. Baby Alone.
A good deal of the book seems to be about losing a mother. It's not perfectly clear how recent or. how remote the loss was, whether it happened when the speaker was a child or an adult; the distinctive thing about the book is that the loss seems to be both recent and to have occurred in childhood. It's as though the adult can immediately gain access, in the here and now, to the feelings of the child, however many years have passed.
Stranger, Baby has a lot in common with Berry's first book, Dear Boy (see Loads of Learned Lumber for July 1, 2020): deadpan wit, formal versatility, a wide range of registers. The underground river of disquiet in it, though, is wider and deeper.
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