I read some poems of Kurt Schwitters in my green, all-embracing years, and even in those days found them baffling, silly even. Seemingly devoid of any semblance of meaning, or any attempt to engage or connect, it was as if he were merely blowing bubbles. It was disappointing because they were so at odds with the jagged but harmonious aesthetic and strangely emotional pull of his art. These thoughts surfaced while reading this disparate and finely drawn collection of poems because I felt that Ruth Danon’s work has parallels with the Dadaist’s intriguing pictures, in that they both steer you gradually towards appreciation, or significance if you like, by dint of whispers and elusive intimations.
Teasingly ambiguous at times, what you initially get from her poetry is a feeling, an atmosphere almost, rather than immediate understanding. But closer consideration reveals, in a very readable framework, much original insight and finely detailed observation assembled from a deep well of experience. She knows of rhythm and pace, colour and connectivity, and pieces them together with a quiet confidence, as evidenced in the rather plaintive “Equipoise”. Describing a scene in which she is “pinned in place / by sunlight, head bowed” she goes on to declare that she belongs to a simpler time, with simpler feelings, and laments the unflattering effect of the light on her hair – hair which is too long for her own good. It’s a poem of quiet revelation, quietly embracing worlds.
The title poem, an elegant piece which begins with a rumination on how best to heat the house as she fears nothing more than the cold, both literal and figurative, is an ostensibly straightforward narrative which holds the ghost of something other, reflecting her spiritual and philosophical outlook. It’s an aura that hovers around each of the fifty or so poems in this collection, the fourth from the poet, teacher and critic. Hers is a gentle, undemonstrative perspective proffered almost reluctantly in a nicely balanced grand tour of ideas and meditations.
The book opens with three rather apposite quotations, in respect of the work that follows, from the pen of the philosopher, cosmologist and poet Giordano Bruno who is referenced again later, along with St Anthony of Egypt, in the odd, and oddly affecting, “Against Nostalgia”. The narrator is telling, in a pleasingly constructed, almost lyrical form, of the rituals of the feast of St Anthony in Sardinia. The proceedings culminate in the circling of a fire in a stubble field, and she is reminded of the Inquisition’s burning alive of the heretic Bruno (a short description of which is provided in parentheses) and concludes with the observation that, after the event, the warm embers are:
twisted, blanched and white
as Bruno’s bright and brilliant bones
An alliterative couplet speaking volumes of the poet’s admiration for the insistently brave and ultimately tragic polymath. It’s a fine piece which led me to look further into the lives of both men, of whose existence I knew little or nothing, and to more fully appreciate her allusions and references.
By turns conversational, confessional, epistolary (a series of fascinatingly random letters addressed to Dear Someone) and momentary, these poems vary enormously in terms of both their content and style. Danon, with an assured knowledge of poetics at her core, is unafraid to play around with form, to experiment and be adventurous in order to realise an idea or press home a point. Especially pleasing are the occasional strips of prose, no more than a few lines long, where the personal and apparently commonplace combine and are somehow magnified to suggest a particular mood perhaps, or to illuminate a scene. One such is the artfully composed “Vectors”, the first three lines of which I’ll quote if only to give an idea of what I’m getting at:
“Ella, the cat, on the ledge, on the edge of discovery. Her eyes follow an uncharacteristic
helicopter till it flies out of the window frame. A matter of prepositions: or the novel
proposition that what remains outside of direct perception is a lure of sorts.”
Happily, you’ll find here no easy uptake of prevailing winds, or the parroting of comfortable, self-reassuring dogma. What you get instead are highly original sketches, notes, fragments of perception skilfully packaged and generously given: such as a simple domestic scene heightened by the contrasting desires of a married couple, or “the pale fact” of a sky pressing heavily down on bare trees. And what a treat it is to come across honest revelations about the physical and psychological frustrations of getting old – if alleviated occasionally by the thought that you might deduct from your age the eight years you spent being sick, or by having witnessed an orange umbrella that had “trotted down a street glossed by rain.” In a lighter, if more cynical vein, I loved the marvellously laconic “One More Thing to Worry About” in which she reacts to a report:
That earth’s magnetic
field is weakening.
This will make
space travel far
more difficult.
No doubt I say. No fucking
doubt.
I’ll end my review of an intriguing and immensely likeable collection by letting you in on an ever-so-slightly surreal piece which, expressed with a muted authority, seems to exemplify the poet’s individual interpretation of an increasingly haphazard world. Slightly surreal because, well, it’s about men falling out of bed. How they must sleep alone, how they must eat alone, and how:
When the women eat alone, they become particular. The place setting
just so, the candles lit, one glass of wine, one piece of
Chocolate to end the meal. This is how we live now. This is what
we have come to.
Still and quietly reasoning, it’s an almost hypnotically puzzling poem which nevertheless possesses an underlying charge that leaves you wondering, reflecting; leaves you wanting more. And isn’t that, in essence, what good poetry is all about?
Robert Dunsdon is from Abingdon in the UK. His poetry has been published in Ambit, Allegro, The Crank, Candelabrum, The Cannon’s Mouth, Decanto, Pennine Platform, Picaroon, Purple Patch and others.His book reviews have featured in Tupelo Quarterly, Heavy Feather Review, The Lit Pub, Sugar House Review, Colorado Review, Los Angeles Review and Poetry International.