In the Absence of Birds (Cervena Barva Press, 2024) by Ruth C. Chad

 

In the Absence of Birds (Cervena Barva Press, 2024) by Ruth C. Chad

REVIEW BY LEE VARON

In this exquisite collection, poet Ruth Chad interweaves her keen attention to the details of our natural world with deep emotions of love, loss, joy, and grief.

Many of the poems in this collection (divided into three sections) focus on the poet’s mother who suffered from Alzheimer’s before she succumbed to the disease in her 90s. These poems read like journal entries with often just dates for titles

I imagine witnessing a loved one fall into the depths of dementia must be heart-wrenching as one sees the person becoming unmoored from their former life. Chad captures this brilliantly in such poems as:

April 24:

Last night I dreamt of mermaids

in the surf

on the white

wild mane of the waves

and floating mussels

with no flesh

no byssus attached

Byssus refers to the protein threads that attach mollusks, such as mussels, to solid surfaces.

What a perfect image of her mother, a shell of her former self, totally unable to attach to anything in the world around her.

Chad is not afraid to plumb the complexities of the mother/daughter relationship. In If Only, she laments the strictures of her mother’s life.

…Long after her death

I will wish

that my mother had been freed

of the yellow walls

of our split level

that she could have walked

calmly away

from the turquoise kitchen

apron trailing behind her in the grass

that she could have walked

calmly away

into the moonrise

and left a path

for me

Chad’s poems are a testament of how we go on, how we manage devastating things and come to terms with them. One thing poetry can do so well is help us survive difficult times and certainly Chad’s poems provide this solace. Through her poetry, she illustrates how it feels to see a loved one slip into illness and infirmity, but she also shows us how one takes in the fullness of another’s life and, in so doing, transmutes this loss into a triumph of the spirit.

These poems are artfully crafted with deceptive simplicity. Often, Chad dispenses with punctuation altogether and the beauty of her words on the page shines forth with its power and resonance. Most of these poems are no longer than a page and among these the poet intersperses haiku and other short poems which serve to crystallize her message as in this poem after her mother’s passing:

February 14

I cried when I dropped the teacup

robin’s egg blue

shattered shards of china

on my kitchen floor

it was yours

No extra words slow the conveyance of the deep emotion in such poems.

There are poems in this collection about travel, the process of aging, and about other family members. All of these are imbued with Chad’s keen attention to the natural world and breathtaking images as in lines from Life in the Pandemic:

A hundred sparrows

gather in the firs flutter

against each other

feathers bronze umber

their chatter

fills the lilac sky…

And in another poem Ice After a Storm, the poet writes:

I shudder

in chill crusty morning

awed by the cold fist of sun

and how small I am

standing here

under the great loud beeches

like a girl in the circus crowd

the wild universe

whirling around me

Certainly, the poems in this enduring collection engender an equal sense of awe.

Lee Varon is a social worker and writer. Her latest poetry book is The Last Bed (2024). She has written two children’s books about substance use disorder: My Brother is Not a Monster: A Story of Addiction and Recovery (2021) and: A Kids Book About Overdose (2024).

Red Letter Poem #239

 The Red Letters

 

 

In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.

To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.

 

––Steven Ratiner

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Red Letter Poem #239

 

 

 

 

 

Askew, Akimbo

 

Charcoal trees drawn down a papery sky

bisect the windbreak, water sketched behind.



From the marsh a Great Blue Heron eyes me.

I hear bloodied horsemen pound arterial roads



where all my sorrows incandesce, and find

I’m as alone in the world as I’ve ever been.



Genealogies of leaves become encampments,

lacquered by rain on graves at the root-foot



of damaged new-growth trees: the Emerald Ash Borer

has carved labyrinthine and curving maze-end scars



on the trunk and limbs in Hubbardston, Massachusetts

for two hundred acres and through the conservancy.



The mackerel sky and dusk appearing so soon

no longer catches me off guard. Winter is approaching.



New England surrenders. I am wed to the world

with a plain, cut-paper ampersand––fragile, slight,



subtle as a footfall of fog disturbing salt marsh hay.

I miss the sea. My old life. A dog. A man. A house.





––Melissa Green







Melissa Green is a lifer. I believe she was born to be a poet, devoted all her creative and emotional energies to the practice, and persisted long after circumstances in her life made such (dare I use the word?) spiritual discipline all but impossible. Her first book, The Squanicook Eclogues, was hailed as an astonishing achievement––both for its formal brilliance and its almost-mythological portrayal of her beloved landscape in Central Massachusetts. But then illness and hospitalization devastated Melissa’s budding career, and it seemed that this incipient dream might be cut short. But again and again over the decades, Melissa would work her way back to the notebook, back to verse of such imaginative discernment and lyrical richness, it provided the ballast through even the most challenging of storms. Her diminutive collection, Fifty-Two––consisting of fifty 5-line poems (each with a dramatic caesura central to its unfolding)––demonstrates the wholeness of intent and brilliance of execution that, to my mind, warrants the term masterpiece. Sadly, that collection is long out-of-print––but if you run across a copy in a used bookstore, trust me: snatch it up immediately. Fortunately, sometime back, Arrowsmith Press published Magpiety: New & Selected Poems which contains a generous sampling of that and other collections.



Here's one of my favorites from Fifty-Two which, to my mind, bears some relationship to today’s Red Letter offering:





The Eater of Paper, The Drinker of Ink





With my pen point, I dig up the watermark, a white peony soft on my tongue.
In that sweet wafer I taste a cluster of birches, cherry, oak. I swallow acres
of forest, seed pods like limpets at my heart.
The nib plunges into a black current.
Its unguent on my lips, I suck down the streets of Evangeline, the drowned parishes
of Katrina, these lines an alphabet drawn from a corpse’s single alchemized hair.



Sometimes it feels as if we are only tethered to this existence by the imaginative investment we make. For such a poet, the watermark of a written page might actually become her communion wafer, providing for a momentary salvation. And the exacting description of one’s surroundings becomes a necessary act of self-perpetuation (even if that bond is as modest as an ‘&’ logogram.)



Receiving a batch of new poems from Melissa, I put up a pot of coffee, ease into my favorite chair, and allow myself to savor the sort of sonic complexity that’s becoming rarer in much contemporary poetry. Lines like “I hear bloodied horsemen pound arterial roads// where all my sorrows incandesce” make me know I am now traversing Ms. Green’s territory, and I’d better keep eyes open, my mind alert. Allow a musical phrase like “Genealogies of leaves” to simmer in your ear for a moment: four long-e sounds amid the lapping of those l’s––sheer pleasure! But like Emily Dickinson or Lorine Niedecker––two poets I think of as Melissa’s forebearers––the intent here extends far beyond lush music and entrancing imagery. Something vital is at stake, as we experience a woman’s life, long after romantic notions have been weathered away: “I’m as alone in the world as I’ve ever been.” Of course, Melissa is not alone in her losses––I’m sure any of us with years under our belts knows how time takes a bite out of our lives. As the New England landscape surrenders to winter, implacable as an invading army, the poet can make this startling statement: “I am wed to the world/ with a plain, cut-paper ampersand”––and we, too, are reminded how precarious the day can feel (though most have the luxury of pretending otherwise.) The poem reaches its resolution with a series of utterly plain but heartfelt declarations: “I miss the sea. My old life. A dog. A man. A house.” Bringing language to this litany of absences––mustn’t this bring a measure of comfort? Enough? My answer about that seems to change with every reading. But I can say this, though, without reservation: Melissa’s life-long literary pursuits have enriched my life immeasurably. I feel a certain pride to be included in the same inky guild as such an artist. My hope is that her next book (and the book after that) will continue to sustain poet and reader alike.

 

 

 

 

Red Letters 3.0

 

 

 

* If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to:

steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com

 

 

* To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

 

and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

http://dougholder.blogspot.com

 

* For updates and announcements about Red Letter projects and poetry readings, please follow me on BlueSky

@stevenratiner.bsky.social

and on Twitter          

@StevenRatiner

 

And coming soon:

a new website to house all the Red Letter archives!

 

Red Letter Poem #238

 

 The Red Letters

 

 

In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.

To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.

 

––Steven Ratiner

 

 

 

 

 

Red Letter Poem #238

 

 

 

 

Two Poems from Martha Collins

Right up front, this must be said: we hope we’re wrong. We pray our fears are unfounded and, as the curtain is about to rise on this second Trump presidency, it contains none of the reckless developments which made the first so disastrous for so many individuals. Perhaps all the promises of retribution against their enemies will prove to be only campaign bluster––and the plans for reshaping two-and-a-half centuries of democratic precedence will never come to pass. But one thing is certain: if we pretend that this is the new normal; if we turn a blind eye to political powerplays and egregious behavior, thinking this is merely an effort to shake things up, then we may experience an unthinkable transformation for these once-United States––a circumstance we never imagined our children, our grandchildren would ever face.



Martha Collins is something of a unique literary talent. Poet, translator, educator, historian without portfolio, she’s been lauded for her book-length examinations of social and political forces and the ways they are manifest in the lives of ordinary Americans (though the poet uncovers extraordinary circumstance at every turn). In 2022, she published her eleventh volume of poetry, Casualty Reports (Pitt Poetry Series). The following year, her fifth volume of translations from the Vietnamese was released; Dreaming the Mountain (in collaboration with Nguyen Ba Chung) carries over into English work from across a forty-year period by the Buddhist poet and scholar Tuệ Sỹ. Among Martha’s trove of honors are fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Witter Bynner Foundation––as well as three Pushcart Prizes, the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize, and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Let me start today with what must surely be one of her briefest of poems (something of a carry-over from last week’s Red Letter installment gathering poetic one-liners:)





Erratum, November 2024



We said it would be close. It wasn’t even





This miniature offers us a glimpse into the DNA of Martha’s poetry: in the smallest of gestures, or the most unassuming of grammatical shifts, the synaptic sparks of a thinking mind are revealed. It likely took a minute or so before you entertained the double-meaning of the word even (truncated, and without punctuation), and the ache of our society’s disequilibrium is conjured once again. But doesn’t the title also elicit a certain fear and trembling? How can something so consequential be reduced to one of those little paper slips (like a ballot?) we sometimes find tucked into a just-published volume?



Sensitized to her technique, there are so many small but potent inflection points in this new poem, “Cast,” which arrived in my inbox. Its composition began eight years back, at the dawn of the first Trump presidency; but she set it aside, perhaps feeling it did not accomplish enough. But when she returned to it in 2024, and updated the dramatis personae, something new and unexpected took place.





Cast





for State the head of Exxon a billionaire

for Labor a critic and violator of labor



for Environmental a climate change denier

for Education a critic of public schools



for Housing someone who simply lived in a house

for Homeland Security someone to build a wall



for Senior Councilor race white don’t ask

for Attorney General immigration watch out



Intermission



for Attorney General accused pedophile oops

for Defense defender of war crimes sex offender



for Homeland Security someone who shot her dog

for Education a wrestling empire exec



for France a family associate convicted felon

for Israel no such thing as Palestinians



for Health a conspiracy anti-vaxxer no training

for whatever he wants the richest man in the world



(2016, 2024)





Once again, the lines feel just a little breathless, lacking all punctuation. The title makes us imagine we’re perusing the inside of a Playbill, as the overture swells and we await the first act. And for each of the President’s appointees, the poet insists on bearing witness, on reminding readers who “only the best people” really turned out to be. The bitter ironies are evident throughout, but I loved a line like “for Senior Councilor race white don’t ask”––there’s a whole op-ed diatribe condensed into those closing four words.



But then comes what is, for me, the most devastating element in the poem, a one-line stanza: “Intermission.” And suddenly the relative calm we’ve felt for four years vanishes––poof!––in a cloud of stage-mist. There were certainly failings during the last administration (we should never turn our national life into a fairy tale, no matter who occupies the White House––self-delusion is the opioid that allows awful things to take place on the national stage.) But life felt (for lack of a better word) normal. What is being promised by the incoming administration is anything but. And as the second act begins, Martha introduces the whole new cast of characters, and my heart turns leaden. Perhaps that is all a poet can do at the moment: demand that we sit up straighter in our seats, pay attention, bear witness to what is taking place. Remember, because of the recent election, we all have earned a certain degree of authorship for the scenes being enacted all around us. Are the actors, emboldened, going off-script? There will be some who applaud. And others whose lives will suddenly be torn open, dashed against these political shoals. We cannot simply choose to exit the theater––that is not an option. The strength of our commitment to this democratic experiment will be tested. The final act is being written as we speak.

 

 

Red Letters 3.0

 

* If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to:

steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com

 

 

* To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

 

and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

http://dougholder.blogspot.com

 

* For updates and announcements about Red Letter projects and poetry readings, please follow me on BlueSky

@stevenratiner.bsky.social

and on Twitter          

@StevenRatiner