Turn Up the Heat by Ruth Danon Review by Aline Soules
Turn Up the Heat by Ruth Danon
Review by Aline Soules
Publisher: Nirala Publications
ISBN: 8195781640
Publication Date: May 25, 2023
Pages: 84 pages
Deduction / Induction: A Review of Turn Up the Heat
In Ruth Danon’s most recent poetry collection, Turn Up the Heat, she faces the world head on. Danon accepts the world as she sees it, in all its details, and considers her personal world of loneliness and desire as she struggles to understand how to live.
In “Pastoral,” Danon writes:
…………….Round stones
…………….Could be sheep.
…………….Round sheep
…………….Could be stones.
This short poem keeps turning. The stones move. Or are they sheep? Or are they just stones moving slowly, the motion of the stones continuing “[a]fter we stopped / [l]ooking.” The complexity inherent in these lines implies contradiction, but the key is “looking” and what happens after we stop “looking.” Even when we look, the facts, even the truth, are in doubt. What we see is elusive. What we assume is not necessarily the case. What we have in this collection is an unreliable narrator who is as close to reliable as she can get through specific detailed observation and reflection.
To introduce this collection, Danon offers three quotes from Giordano Bruno, a 16th century philosopher, poet, and theorist, who began as a Dominican friar, but who, at various points, embraced everything from Calvinism to cosmic pluralism to pantheism to reincarnation, eventually being burned at the stake. The quotes echo through the poems.
The first quote, “The light that exists in relation to substance is the last vestige of the light that, they say, burst forth as the first act of creation,” connects the first moment that sparks the process of writing the poem (the first light, the first idea) with the existence of the final poem (the idea made substance).
Danon begins her collection with “Time Travel,” by imagining the future:
…………….The first winter
…………….it snowed often and I was
…………….already edging
…………….my way into being old.
Future and past, first and old (last). She will “let [herself] turn / silver and amazed,” and she will read mysteries to seek understanding of betrayals she “didn’t / yet understand.” She then speaks of snow and cold, how she was cold, “as if / warmth would come at too / high a price.” Yet, even as she “was edging into age” she “was tentative / in the way of a young girl.” In the end, the snow that was clinging to the trees, “tumbled into the river / that rushed past // the place where [she] lived.” Even in the first winter when the snow fell, she aged and it is already past (past tense). The snow falls, as the poet will, and it rushes past, as life does. The future becomes the past. instant by instant.
In “Turn Up the Heat,” the title poem, the reader learns the importance of the cold she has introduced, as she and her partner debate woodstoves. From the mundane details of that choice, she writes: “My need is to avoid cold. My need is / not to be afraid of what I fear.” The poem expands to talk about how her fear “seems small,” but it’s not:
…………………………………………They say
…………….that what we most fear is what
…………….will kill us.
She has earned this conclusion, but she doesn’t end the poem there. She returns to specifics and to the small things of life that now loom large:
………….…………….…In the hospital where
…………….I spent too much time I begged
…………….for warm blankets. Sometimes
…………….they had them. Sometimes not.
Her fear of being killed by her fear is concrete, but the warm blankets that will save her from that fear may not be available. Being saved, therefore, is random. Life is random.
Prose poems are interspersed through this collection. Some confront large topics directly; some obliquely. For example, in “Nepenthe,” two women speak of learning “to live with disappointment” as they travel to Nepenthe at Big Sur. Nepenthe is a real place in Big Sur, as well as the name of “a fictional drug of healing: a drug meant to erase pain”). On arrival, they climb stairs and turn to a view of “[o]cean and sky, scrubbed rocks, small pond,” a view so large, words cannot serve it. Yet, the focus is on the small pond “cloudy as the eye of God.” The poet’s companion says, “when I die, my soul will go there.” Once again, that’s not the end of the poem, which turns. The companion adds, “and after a while I will just disappear.” One of the poet’s strengths is her ability to take one more step, to give the reader a constant turn of ideas, to make the small (pond), large (soul), and the large (soul), small (disappear).
In contrast, in the prose poem “Shift,” the poet walks with a friend and offers images interspersed with irony. “Ice floes still floating. Water flowing. Mud season. Mad season. Trying out good cheer. Flat ground. Fat chance.” The internal rhymes followed by the plosive “m” sounds embed the images in the reader’s consciousness. When these lead to “[f]at chance,” the irony is a delight. In the second half of this very short poem, the poet offers images of a train, a flock of birds, then ends: “If I could tell you what happens next, I would.” So much in these images and words, in these apparently small things. Whether considering ice or mud or warm blankets (from her title poem), they will all disappear, as the companion says in “Nepenthe.”
One of the most complex poems in this collection is “Small Town Zuihitsu,” which is presented with this note: “(the aim is the construction of the illusion of spontaneity).” The tone is conversational, almost an essay. First, she offers domesticity: “Usually, these days I write late at night. After dinner. After the cats are fed.” Next, she observes the world from her window, at dusk, reflecting on an earlier moment when “the sun turned the mountain […] a reddish tone, not red, not brown, not the gold of the fall, but an almost red, an almost blush.” As in “Time Travel,” the reader is presented with different time frames. Then she writes: “I’m training myself to see.” But this sight is the implication of action, “a willingness to leave the boundaries of [her] own thought,” leading to her teaching students “about deductive and inductive logic,” ideas that echo in the work. In deductive reasoning, a researcher collects and examines empirical evidence to test a theory. In inductive reasoning, a researcher gathers and analyzes data, then constructs a theory to explain findings.
In many ways, the poem is a commentary on her own poems: going from the specific to the general and the general to the specific, the “enigma of evidence,” data, inference, the language game, Bruno’s awareness of the stars. She circles back to the “now” of what she sees out the window: “the sky has turned a vivid blue and the birches have disappeared. The mountain is a mere outline.” Then Danon writes:
Not everyone has a clear picture of the limitations of the choices I’ve offered.
…………….1) Fetishize the observable world.
…………….Or
…………….2) Become trapped in the limits of the propositional.
A false binary. Rather, say more simply:
…………….night, sky, stars, limit, solitude
She contrasts the “false” binary with the expanse of options by gathering what she sees in the world that takes her back “where [she] was at the beginning, “alone in [her] house as voices on the street fade away.” This is the image of the poet, alone, thinking deeply to find a way to make those thoughts resonate for the reader.
In her collection, Danon considers what it means to have a life and how it is possible to meld what can be both deduced and induced from the observable world. She invites the reader to join her.
Ruth Danon is the author of four published books of poetry. After retiring from NYU, where she created, directed, and taught in a creative and expository writing program for adult degree students (SPS), she moved to Beacon, New York, where she founded Live Writing: A Project for the Reading, Writing, and Performance of Poetry. She teaches through Live Writing and New York Writers Workshop and curates programs in the Hudson Valley and New York City.
Aline Soules’ work has appeared in such publications as the Kenyon Review, Houston Literary Review, Poetry Midwest, Galway Review, and Flash Fiction Magazine. Her book reviews have been accepted by Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, and others. She earned her MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles in poetry and fiction. Online: https://alinesoules.com
29 November 2023
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