This collection by Avia Tadmor is elegiac and complex, holding a multitude of layers in the varied poems. Fully eleven out of the thirty-two poems center around the biblical Ruth, a non-Jew who married into the clans only to be left widowed and alone, but for her mother-in-law Naomi, as all the men of the family perished for an unknown reason. Even though she was not one of them, Ruth stayed with Naomi and left the city of Moab, a town in Jordan east of the Dead Sea that had been her only home. Her act of love and selflessness in staying with the older women led her to be praised by the Jews and honored by their god. She is the great-grandmother of the famous King David.
Indeed, much in this collection centers around the Jewish faith and their long history. The first poem of the collection is “Exodus Song” is full of tortured images; drowning, horseshoes snapping off terrorized, running horses like ”blades,” those same horse3s”running and running until they are no longer/ horses...{that} lift and lash/ like decades dusting a country/ with wet black ash.” Later a “boy watching/ his teacher on fire, how her body relights the city’s/ ghostspun square.” Shifts to a girl in another country writing questions with a pen that is also “a stronghold, a lighthouse.” This image would be reassuring if not for the epigraph to the collection the page before, a quote from Luise Glück “It’s like a lighthouse, except that, as one swims toward it, it backs away.” This chilling image haunts the entirety of the collection, leaving the reader unsettled, pondering hard questions and not finding satisfactory answers.
The other poems of this collection also offer fresh imagery and a visceral, felt sensation. In “Ruth Before Leaving Moab” fear is “filling the throat like live birds/ bunched in a smokestack before a thunderstorm.” This sense of doom is further shown in the end of the poem when these “women who have walked away” know “that each stride onward, there will be more/ & more to lose.” This complicates and makes real the story of Ruth, an non-native woman alone with only an aging mother-in law in a fairly misogynistic, insular culture that is less than welcoming to her. Rather than singing and strewing the path with wildflowers, Ruth is aware of all that she must leave behind for a future that is uncertain. This speaker can also be mirrored in what is going on today in the Middle East, with genocide, uncertainty and generational trauma being enacted in real time.
‘Ruth One Year After Leaving Moab” is still conflicted and pushing against the constraints of life. Here the speaker states “All my life I’ve been told/ I am greedy for loving this earth/ not when it yields, but after –/ when it is made large with hollows.” Haunted by the memories of her past this speaker seems to need the ability to ask questions such as “How else to live?” with the memory of “hinged gates/ choking with bands of wild garlic” and oxen “doing work through a life/ they did not chose.” This Ruth is attempting to force herself into some kind of contentment, even as she yearns for something else, the promise of “next year’s meal.” The language, especially the verbs, “choking,” “stuffed,” “snared,”, “displaced,” “clutch,” “break,” they are all heavy, foreboding, pulling the reader down to the level of the ground almost like a blacksmith’s hammer hitting molten iron, forcing it into a new shape. This is not an easy, grace-filled life, but one fought for every day, both with the toil of the oxen and the mental focus of refusing to turn back.
This refusal to turn back can be seen also in “My Grandfather Shows Me the Sepia Photograph Tucked in his Passport Pocket but Does Not Say Auschwitz.” Here, for eight pages Tadmor has given her readers empty pages, except for numbers that correspond to footnotes. The numbers correspond to absent pictures, that are poetically described below. Each one is a testament to loss, to the pain of systematic annihilation. The boy featured in these missing photos “is but a figment,” “is not,” “is a fog,” “is a breath in the cold.” This non-being articulates the immense trauma of living through a Nazi concentration camp and watching those around you “thin.” “When I appeared as you know me, there was no god, and I had to make my own” says the grandfather to the child. He talks of his family, his sister, Malka, that had the same lips as the child’s mother. There is no mention of WWII, but that very absence makes it more present. More than once the reader reads “you must turn away from this.” It is the very act of turning away that has allowed the grandfather to be more than fog, more than a figment. If he had not looked away, boarded the refugee boat, and lived, he would be forever that breath in cold air, dissipating into nothing.
None of the poems in this collection are easy, easy to read, easy to comprehend, or easy to forget. Many of them are chilling and even those not focused on Judaism and the past offer little in way of celebration or praise. Many of the speakers have complex, even contentious relationships to the Jewish god, written in a lower case very purposefully. He often feels callous, if not downright abusive and the reader is left feeling a distinct lack of warmth for him. This can best be shown through the poem “Here No River Flows So He Names the Village Oasis.” She writes “In every language I speak to god, I ask/ what does it mean for a land to be promised?/ Lord, for any promise to hold on this hill:/ let it live like the word–/ as part of compromise.” This compromise is essential for Ruth as for the other speakers in these poems, otherwise they risk becoming nothing but “a figment.”