Letting the Sound Wake You: Renée Gregorio’s Abyss & Bridge review by Devon Balwit

Letting the Sound Wake You: Renée Gregorio’s Abyss & Bridge

A Taos Press, 2021

In Renée Gregorio’s latest collection Abyss & Bridge, the narrator of the poem “12 Crop Circles: India” is told: “You don’t have to believe / in our gods—just prostrate…” If her readers are not practitioners of any martial art nor steadfast devotees of any religion or way, they must follow the same advice. Instead of stopping at the threshold of poems that speak of calm, of arriving, of faith, attracted to such glimpses of nirvana but always a bit skeptical or resistant, they must give themselves over to the pace and places of Gregorio’s questing. I think she would understand this back-and-forth dance of yielding and resisting, writing as she does in “Communion”:

when the rituals failed me

when I discovered no meaning

in the priest’s repertoire

[…]

—I rebelled

—I learned to listen inside.

What we hear loudest when listening to the voice of Abyss & Bridge is the song of brokenness and of witness, which Gregorio sings well.

Her book takes its name from its epigraph, an excerpt from Polish poet Wisława Szymborska’s Labyrinth:

and yes to all of this, 

then abruptly an abyss, 

an abyss, but a little bridge, 

a little bridge, but shaky,

shaky, but the only,

there is no other.

Set on this shaky bridge, an embodied being and destined for breakage, I immediately thought of Szymborska’s compatriot Zbigniew Herbert. In Herbert’s poem “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito,” Cogito is warned that despite his noblest intentions and most valiant of efforts, he will most likely fail: “[Y]ou were saved not in order to live […] / They will reward you… / with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap.” Yet despite such grim threats, he and we are still enjoined to “give testimony,” to “Be faithful Go.” Gregorio carries on in this tradition.

Emboldened then, the reader sets off with the narrator on a global journey across Europe, Asia, and Latin America. As we journey, we learn that to move is to fall, to be thrown, to roll, and to rise back up. Of course, such motion is a key part of aikido, of which Gregorio is a student. In her first poem, “The Grace of Now,” we are enjoined: “[I]f falling is the only way to touch the ground, / surrender to what’s startling and right.” The novice faller tends to exaggerate the evils of tumbling whereas the skilled practitioner realizes that such a radical change in both state and perspective allows for new insights. A woman who falls on a street in “Psychic House” is told by her acupuncturist: “Fall not bad. You OK,” and in “What Stone Knows,” we are asked to consider “what shattering, what breaking / made you know what you’re made of?” Though it seems counterintuitive, we must learn how to fall. A practitioner of kalarippayattu tells the narrator in “Far into Nothing,” “Don’t slap down hard with your foot—let it fall from the center of your body.” Finally, we hope, like the narrator of “Transmission,” to be able to admit: “I fell in love with falling…” Falling forces us to relocate our center and gives us the opportunity to decide how and when we will rise again. 

And of course, much of the falling is metaphorical. People in these poems fall to political strife, to injustice, to poverty, to illness and to old age. Relationships fall to the passage of time. One journey, one country, one city falls before the next: “beyond the gate, another arrival” (“Finding the Way”). The religion of one’s birth falls to the ones or to the none we choose as adults. 

Since falling may mean breakage, Gregorio asks in “Increase,” “how do we hold each other’s ruptures?” How, like Mr. Cogito, do we make the most of our precarious state? Gregorio offers examples. One’s crumbling past can be reclaimed and reinhabited, one’s ancestral language reconjured on the tongue, and the tongue reawakened through the explosive flavors of traditional delicacies. In “Sicilian Home,” Gregorio visits

Crumbling churches alive with oratorios,

intricate carvings of cherubs—

[…]

marble inlay spiraled columns

A statue of Santa Lucía, “with a sword through her neck / and her platter full of eyeballs” serves as a still point of grace for her pilgrim freed from routine. In the island city of Caltagirone, a “man with a bandaged hand / still spoke by gesturing with that hand.” We find the beauty in and despite distance and decay. Imperfect, we find ways to sing, to paint, to draw, to express ourselves. 

As we fall, break, and reassemble, continent to continent, we move through poems ranging from long, dense free verse to airy, haiku-like observations. All contain detailed observation of people and place. In one, we push back against male line-cutters at an Indian railway station. In another, we dip a spoon into an Italian confection shaped like a nun’s breast. We buy goods from Greek shop-women with names of mythological power. We wrinkle our noses at the smell of pit latrines. We get lost on our way to the dojo and helped by the locals. We sit at the feet of teachers, beside the beds of the dying, and couple with our beloved in yet other beds. We are dislocated and relocated as we metabolize our experience. The poem “If Someone Asks” encapsulates this motion thus:

[S]he’s flying with her feet planted on the earth, 

searching the ocean of her birth 

for life that wasn’t there before

Gregorio is ever in motion, practicing fearlessness as she seeks to soften and expand. Where, then, do we end? “Sometimes,” Gregorio tells us, “it all fits together— / […] and we make ourselves whole”(“Seven Paintings in One”).  However, “Transmission” counters with: “even though you plant a million seeds / there might never be flowers.” As we knew from the first, victory is not assured. Even so, we undertake the daily effort—oddly joyful. As the narrator confesses in “The Singing,” “I do not think for a minute / that any god is watching, / but I feel the gods watching.” Though we cannot fully explain the luminous vibration we feel in stumbling through our lives, Renée Gregorio’s Abyss & Bridge sounds it like a bell.

Devon Balwit’s poems and reviews can be found here in the Los Angeles Review as well as in The Worcester Review, The Cincinnati Review, Tampa Review, Barrow Street, Tar River Poetry, Sugar House Review, Poetry South, saltfront, Rattle and Grist among others. Her newest collections are Rubbing Shoulders with the Greats [Seven Kitchens Press 2020] and Dog-Walking in the Shadow of Pyongyang [Nixes Mate Books, 2021]. For more, see her website at https://pelapdx.wixsite.com/devonbalwitpoet

December 1 2021