Ren Powell’s most recent book, Mercy Island, has been in my purse for weeks, months now. I have read it through at least twice; have gone back to some (many — actually most) of the poems over and over. And over. Yet I don’t know what to say about the book other than you must read it to understand it, to love it for yourself. It is a complex book with gorgeous language. It’s at once accessible and strange. The lives in it are those I can relate to and yet are so foreign as to be a travelogue from mythology. But a mythology that is at once relatable, as all great myths are. Truthful and revealing. Harsh and beautiful.

My favorite poem in the book is the 18-part “Red-Eared Slider” with its tracery of family mapping the heart like fragments of lost scrolls. Each lovely and revealing, yet it leaves lots of white space and silence for the reader to wonder over and fill in. It is harrowing and yet rewarding.

The book’s poems inhabit a range of style and pacing. Some are as short as curls of hair on the cutting floor.

A Creature Bearing Fruit

early morning wet
musty from the dream that gathers itself—spent
tip-toeing in the dim light

and the baby flops like a slippery fish
from the easing grip of muscle

Others can move over the space of pages and years. Some are straightforward yet no less mysterious and musical for it.

When We Met

It was October
I remember because that is the month
that goes into double digits
and the birches start shedding their leaves
and the slender prongs of the rake twang
like bluegrass music

It was Sunday
I remember because the wind
had been blowing in my ear all morning
and the clanging of the bells had scraped the canal raw
And the thunder afternoon was loud with the deep
hum of your words

Your story was spices and metals I couldn’t identify
Your story wandered like the veins of the back of your hand
when you pressed my forearm for emphasis
or help. Do you know I hardened to bear it.
—recast by the friction ridges of your fingertips
whorls that spin ever-outward?

Ren kindly answered a few questions about how this particular book, her first published in North America, was created:

DS: I am curious about how the book came to be. I had thought you were looking for someone to publish An Intimate Retribution for North American readers. But Mercy Island is a very different book. Why did you and Beth Adams decide to go with “new & selected”? What is it about the shape & substance of this book that you wanted to accomplish? Which poems are new for this collection?

RP: I did consider sending out the manuscript for An Intimate Retribution, but realized that whatever book I could get accepted by a publisher would be my first exposure to North American readers. I wanted to put my best foot in the door, so to speak. I have also had a need to send many of my poems ”home” - the poems Norwegians really can’t deeply connect with, those of the desert and of pet turtles with peace signs painted on their backs.

I tried to put together a collection that showed the span of my poetics. Some of the “new” poems, such as “Coupling” and “A Stranger Passing” had been published in journals. A few poems, like “Gulah”, which was an experiment in unusual meter, had never found a home. I didn’t write any new poems particularly for this collection because the manuscript seemed to take shape organically.

Once I had a draft of a manuscript, I realized much of the book was about cultural meetings. So when I saw Phoenicia’s mission statement, I thought my new and selected manuscript might be a good fit and I send a cold letter of introduction.  I was thrilled when Beth replied that she also thought it might be a good fit.

Once Beth got to working with the manuscript she began looking at ways to group and order the poems. She suggested we dump some poems, which we did, of course. The collection came to be more than a documentation of culture clashes – it became a portrait of a coming-of-age in the world.

I couldn’t be more grateful to Beth for the way she shaped the book. It has made it, in my eyes, much more than a collection of poems. It’s almost been therapeutic to know someone was able to see the whole of my journey as a writer and as a person in these pieces.

DS: I adore “Red-Ear Slider” for so much: its complexity, how fully developed it is, how brave the voice in going deep & far; the smartness for developing it as poem in a series, the surprising & beautiful images. It seems as though that poem shaped the rest of the collection, but perhaps it’s a natural assumption a reader would have. Please tell me more about it, if you would.

RP: Thank you so much for those words! That compliment means a lot to me.

I guess “Red-Eared Slider” does shape the rest of the collection, because it is the story of what shaped me.

When I was doing my MA, I was feeling very comfortable with fragmented narratives and I wanted to write a memoir in verse. But how could I write a memoir that was not “about” me? I had a fear of Confessionalism, since my story was such a cliché. What could I present to readers who’ve been jaded by the glut of “crappy childhood” poetry and therapeutic writing to find and still tell the truth? I was very ambitious. Ted Deppe was my tutor and was a fantastic and patient mentor – and, in effect, editor.

I think writing that series made me the poet I am. I found a form for dealing with facts vs truth. Composite characters became second nature. I know that I demand an awful lot from the reader, though: the incest and murder are understated – I guess that’s an understatement in itself.

I continue to work towards being more accessible, but there is a fine line when it comes to revealing the facts. I am not trying to be mysterious or coy, like some literary stripper, but what is really important, what is really true is always what lies at the periphery of the “shocking” event (which, honestly, is never all that shocking). In my poetry, what I want to talk about is usually what is overshadowed or glossed over with preconceived attitudes.

For example, I remember workshopping the poem “Listening” and some members kept trying to reshape the poem to focus on the grief of the woman telling her story of rape. But my poem is actually about her anger and about the peripheral (and understandable) brutality in her retelling her story to a stranger. It is not politically correct, but it is empathetic and honest: brutally honest. That poem was in “An Intimate Retribution” and I was thrilled when a reviewer said that I wrote political poetry but was not a “slogan poet”.

I think, as a poet, I want to make people own up to the truths that make them uncomfortable, and then forgive themselves, and others, for being human. Marriages and political ideologies can’t withstand that level of honesty, but I think poetry can.

DS: Over how many years did you write these poems? Did you make revisions to them to help shape the collection I now read?

RP: The earliest poems in Mercy Island were written in the mid-90s. The most recent in 2009. I didn’t make any revisions. I try to let poems be once they have been finished. Of course, as time passes, I change as a person I can look at a poem and think I could rewrite it “better” now, but it would just be different. I have to let them be, like Polaroids that lock in a time and a particular angle of truth.

/ / /

I wish I had been as clever to respond to the book as did Carolee Sherwood and Dave Bonta. You can read “A View for an Island” at Rachel Barenblat’s blog. Dave and Kristin Berkey-Abbott have included Ren’s book in their “Via Negativa Poetry Month book club.” Look/listen for a podcast about it, soon.

Order the book from Phoenicia Publishing and the creative talent gets a better cut.

I say creative talent because it is both Ren and Beth Adams who get praise for their gorgeous work. Order by April 30^th and get 15% off.

 

 

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