Review: Indigo by Ellen Bass

reviewed by Bruce Spang

Indigo
by Ellen Bass
Copper Canyon Press, April 2020
$18.00, 64pp
ISBN: 978-1556595752

In a recent virtual workshop at Maine Media, Ellen Bass was one of the presenters. Her lecture on wildness in poetry focused on how to unleash your poems, citing, among others, Frank Gaspar, who, when he writes a poem intentionally “blows the poem up,” shifting from one narrative to an entirely different one in a matter of a few lines. When asked how she blows her poems up, she talked about inserting words from a word-list, unexpected words, that often shift the poem into another dimension and open up the poem. Her book is a manual on how to use misdirection in an orderly fashion. She hold together two seemingly disparate poetic traditions that Tony Hoagland used, in his essay “Fear of Narrative and the Skittery poem of Our Moment,” the narrative and the disassociative mode of writing.

Hoagland admits that they’re not “each other’s aesthetically opposites or sworn enemies.” Yet they have very different agendas. He says

 …………………Narrrative . . .implicitly honors Memory; the disassociative mode values invention.                                 …………………“Poetries of continuity” in the same way aim to frame and capture experience;                                             …………………disassociative poetry verifies itself by eluding structure. Their distinct priorities result in
 …………………different poetics. A poetry that values clarity and continuity is obligated to develop and
 …………………deliver information in ways that are hierarchical and sequential, ways that
 …………………accommodate and orchestrate the capacities of human memory. In contrast, a
 …………………disassociative poetry is always shuffling the deck in order to evade knowability.
 …………………(Hoagland, Read Sofistikasun (Saint Paul: Greywolf, 2016), 183-4)

He speaking of the two forces in our nature, the Dionysian, “the god of ecstasy” that favors “the irrational, sensuous, blissed-out. . .the rending apart of the rational and linear by intoxication” and the Apollonian that favors “economy and proportion.” (Ibid, “On Disproportion,” 118-21) Bass manages to balance these countervailing forces in her poems as she has in her life. For Indigo is a book that has such emotional range because she’s been a wife to a husband, a mother to her children, a wife to her present wife and lover—all of which finds its place in her verse. What is most striking is that, even as her life has crossed the borders of conventional society, even as she’s lived in the norm and outside it, her poems never lose their compassion and love for those who’ve shared her life. In the poem, “Marriage,” she celebrates being with her wife by leaping away from two bodies coming together, inviting multiple associations:

 …………………When you finally, after long suffering, lay
 …………………the length of your body on mine, isn’t it
 …………………like the strata of earth, the pressure
 …………………of time on sand, mud, bits of shell, the moving
 …………………water, wind, ice that carry the minutes,
 …………………minerals that use sediment into rock. (16)

From the intimate moment, she reaches out with an extended simile. Their union isn’t just of two lovers laying in bed but of the earth and its rich topography and history. Sharon Olds has a poem like this about two lovers who had been apart, coming together, by naming how their bodily parts are like the states of the union becoming one. Yet Bass has an ability to pull back the expansive move by asking an intimate question about one body on another:

 …………………How to bear the weight, with every
 …………………Flake of bone pressed in?

And then answers it in such exquisitely beautiful images it takes the breath away:

 ………………………………………………O love,
 …………………it is balm and it seals. It binds us tight
 …………………as the fur of a rabbit to the rabbit.

I must admit it. I wrote this review just to write that line—“as the fur of a rabbit to a rabbit”—which takes all the expansive six lines and the querulous next two lines and folds them into one perfect image. She knows how to let her poem roam but brings it home. The poem in a lesser poet might end there happily. Bass, however, takes the tenderness of that moment and that image and literally tears it apart.

 …………………When you strip it, grasping the edge
 …………………of the sliced skin, pulling the glossy membranes
 …………………apart, the body is warm and limp. If you could,
 …………………you’d climb inside that wet, slick skin
 …………………and carry it on your back.

These lines, she balances the Dionysian and the Apollonian in each hand. She describes the gruesome eviscerating of the carcass, seemingly violent turn after the tender moment before it. But then, this gory moment turns to the sensual diving into the skin and the sweet gesture of carrying it on your back. As Hoagland notes, there’s the disassocative, free-wheeling moment followed by a measured response.

I wouldn’t spoil what she does next that is both startling and sweet, but I can say that, in the final line, she makes the marriage “a hoarse cry, the stubborn hunger” that, for anyone who has been married once as convention instructed and, then, married again, as the heart demanded, knows all too well.  What is amazing about her poems, and this being a classic example, is how adeptly she can swerve the poem in different directions, incorporating very wide-ranging emotional tones, yet manage to pull them together at the end.

As an admirer of Tony Hoagland who was able to do the very same thing, speaking in the voice of the male, the lame, over-sexualized, macho male, I find that Bass is able to do the same thing as a woman, teasing out what it means to be a mother, a lover, a poet in the twenty-first century.

If she were a painter, I would be able to walk you through the gallery of her poems, pointing out, as I did, her craft, how she knows how to balance her sentences, having left and right branching ones, followed by quick short ones, inserting fragments on occasion; how she knows where to break a line, leaving us hanging on a word, or shutting the door on a word; how she works the music in her lines; how she varies her stanzas and line breaks, making them mirror what she’s wanting us to experience.  But, short of that, let me give you some lines with a brief sketch of what the context of them are, a kind of verbal gallery walk.

In a poem “Pines at Ponary,” about a concentration camp, she describes the train:

 …………………They were here when
 …………………the trains wheeled on numb
 …………………rails.

The use of an annotated enjambment ( a breaking of syntax in an unusual place) is perfectly wrought here: numb/rails. You get the horror of the moment with “numb” hanging on the end of the line, literally.

A poem about a mother-in-law with dementia called “Not Dead Yet,” she presents what the woman asks

 …………………My mother-in-law. Should I kill myself? She asks me—
 …………………her mind an abandoned building,
 …………………a few squatters lighting fires in the empty rooms.

Another deft move, taking the question and not moving to the Apollonian response, letting the narrator speak and say something in response— “Of course not”—she goes into the woman’s mind and compares it to an abandoned building that is, when I read it, an act of empathy, respect for what is going on in her mind.

In “Sometimes I’m frightened,” she presents how she feels when her lover is ill, rapidly losing weight.

 …………………When she recedes I feel how ragged I am.

 …………………The clouds are torn into bits. Each separate drop that falls
 …………………like a moment of needing her.

 …………………I kiss her. I just can’t keep on
 …………………kissing and kissing her. Even though

 …………………That’s what I want. To fall. . .

In what could be a sentimental, even maudlin poem she manages to make the moment come alive with remarkable pacing of the lines, the hesitations—falls/like; on/kissing; Even though/that’s; and To fall—create suspense, hold us off before letting us onto the next word. If this weren’t carefully paced, the language (“kissing and kissing her”) might seem overplayed. But within these stanzas, the “kissing and kissing her” are embedded in a line that leads to an “even though” which modulates them, and calls them into question, but accents them at the same time.

Ranging from the surreal when the front of the house is lifted off the foundation, leaving the couple exposed to the world to the lyric and the narrative, her poems have a startling range. They’re funny, poignant, sad, distraught, angry, tender—a whole range of emotions. In short, they’re very human and affirm our common humanity. When you read her poems, you feel as if you’ve walked, as she has, though many lives unflinching at what they have to offer us about our humanity. She is one of our major poets for a good reason. Not just because she’s a deft craftsman but because she is what one of my favorite children’s book—The Velveteen Rabbit—calls the rabbit once it has arrived at being fully itself—she’s real. And that is not something easy to come by these days.

Bruce Spang, former Poet Laureate of Portland, is the author of two novels, The Deception of the Thrush and Those Close Beside Me. His most recent collection of poems, All You’ll Derive: A Caregiver’s Journey, was just published. He’s also published four other books of poems, including To the Promised Land Grocery and Boy at the Screen Door (Moon Pie Press) along with several anthologies and several chapbooks. He is the poetry and fiction editor of the Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine. His poems have been published in Connecticut River Review, Red Rover Magazine, Great Smokies Review, Kalopsia Literary Journal, and other journals across the United States. He teaches courses in fiction and poetry at Ollie at University of North Carolina in Asheville and lives in Candler, NC with his husband Myles Rightmire and their five dogs, five fish, and thirty birds.