When singers publish poetry collections—particularly, those from mainstream genres—I find that their common thrust is one of drawn-out introspection. There’s no need to belt out snappy hooks or offer propelling grooves that slot onto everyone’s playlists and algorithms. Spared from the pop song equations (verse, chorus, verse, chorus—and maybe a bridge if we’re feeling snazzy), poetry offers the terrifying possibility of the blank page. And—as proven by any intro creative writing course—that terror oftentimes snakes into stereotypes and fluff without formal constraint. No chords or melodies can do the heavy lifting for songwriters, here: concision is afforded in translation from lyric to lyric. And to this, to the terror of poetry, Emma Ruth Rundle writes: “It’s not about being taken seriously.”
As much as I hate to disagree with her here, I am taking this dazzling collection quite seriously. “The Bella Vista,” while a sprawling collection of relationship, sobriety, and touring, succeeds as a baton-pass from music to musing without shedding a single ounce of her cutthroat nuance. A guitarist, songwriter, visual artist, and badass, Rundle has released half a dozen eclectic records that range from doom metal to electroacoustic, Americana to ambient, folk rock to shoegaze. What threads her canon together is her pitch-perfect pen, displayed at its finest on her full-bodied 2021 release, “Engine of Hell.” Backed by harrowing keys and sparse guitar, she devastates on top of some of the softest productions she’s chirped over before.
That balance between ruin and devotion is one of Rundle’s poetic angles. In the gatefold, a snapshot of the first and eponymous poem of the collection, her speaker commands: “rip up this book, my love / i wrote it for you.” I read this and feel the very pages I hold disintegrate. There is force in dedication: a brazen gravity tethers Rundle’s speaker to a dynamic that stretches and contracts across continents. Rather than reveal her entire hand, though, she casts spells that stun in their simplicity: “i wish i’d never known any language at all / other than the giving of simple gifts.” From “ripping” to “wishing,” her poems resonate because of their whiplash. The motion rings in my ears like an idyllic form of tinnitus.
Still grounded, Rundle’s grip on frustration feeds her experimental forms. “After That Unbearably Cold Church Show in Eastern Europe, the One a Cat Came to”—what a title!—details a past lover shipping arid flowers “across the world and time” to the “ice house” her speaker cozies into on the road. Following her cry of “impossible,” stanzas, like meltwater, slide up and across the dip of the page and cascade back down. To cobble up a motive on her address’s end, she grasps at images that burn and brim with tension: “pages / of pressed tulips and petals / rain // over what was the Soviet Union // Fragments of forbidden tomes // A volcanic lush blown / purposeful ash and ember.” Hey, what ever happened to the “Unbearable Cold”? Among the scatter, though, she concretizes her expansive lyric with confession: “Then overnight springtime. / I’ll never understand you.”
With a similar charge, “Rose Window” exhilarates with its tight line breaks and rhythms, trailing acid in their wake. Much like a cut from Rundle’s luminous “On Dark Horses,” the form here embraces claustrophobia, now put to the page with a single word per line: “pomegranates / seed / the / afternoon / many / mini / moons / opalesce.” Captured somewhere between the sleazy and the divine, the momentum here builds with the friction of a hook-up. The twin verbs here—“seed” and “opalesce”—leave a sliver of skin to the imagination. Rather than surrender to euphemism, any subtlety is shredded: “the / reborn / in / gilded / cups / of / stars / and / semen.”
Because of her directness, Rundle lets “The Bella Vista” act as a centerpiece for her other creative practices. Accompanied with the collection is an album of ambient piano works, a parallel to her aforementioned “Engine of Hell.” Chatter from passersby and Rundle’s own voice simmer at the edges of these recordings not in flaw, but in flourishing. Another intervention here is her photography, which splices poems and offers direct glimpses in the solitude that touring alone comes with: an unmade bed, a single white rose, a flock of birds just arriving at the camera’s edge. Hyper-visual and hyper-sonic, the collection brims with passion—a passion I can’t help but latch onto.
Yet in the tumult of forms, love, and tour stops, Rundle’s sense of interior still buoys her speaker to the immediate, the now. Neighboring “Rose Window with the Five of Coins” implicates its former poem’s momentum under the Minor Arcana, now signifying treachery and alienation. Indeed, sensual rhythm is traded for chewy diction: “Sour and scaled aperture of us obdurates / Such misery and too twisted faces.” More directly, in the throes of vice, she reverts to silence: “Meals from a can repeating / It’s not a relapse because I didn’t drink / Everything prescribed / I don’t play music / ... / I will never sing again.” Travel is no escape, and Rundle admits later on that “even as I vowed to carry you, little boy, / over your inked river, / I am not so righteous.” As she moves through the spiralling wounds of heartbreak, so too does she pull a tarot card for herself—a kind of mythic mirror.
As Rundle also moves from place to place. her gaze is stained by the weight and wounds of what she carries. “Leirian” depicts the boiling city in Portugal alongside a photograph of a dress, drying in the blaze. Rundle’s ekphrastic blur here maps both her physical position and condition: “Twisting in a heated mess,” for one, and also “furl[ing] inward / away from the anguishing swelter / ... / Seeking a relief / that cannot come by action.” There is no respite here: from a poem at the other end of the collection, “A city of devouring urges / corrupting elsewhere.”
This “elsewhere” arrives toward the conclusion of “The Bella Vista”—as the gatefold describes, “a sort of peace.” It may be a return to her musical form—“Soon these poems will / drift back into melodies”—or it may be a venture into the deeper unknown—“ the not knowing...makes life worth living.” Regardless, Rundle’s speaker lands where “The Bella Vista” began—the terrifying possibility of the blank page: “It’s that anything could happen / The way you happened out of thin air, / ... / In the moment I dropped my cane / and my guard // You appearing.” And, damn, does this collection appear.
Billy Greene is a poet, mover, and musician hailing from Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Florida’s Gulf Coast. With explosive devotion, they capture fragments of intimacy that mark distances both molecular and sprawling. They are an undergraduate student and dance fellow at Lawrence University, where they run a newspaper and whip up a decent latte. Their work has appeared in The Three Lamps, fifth wheel press, and fsm.