Erin Rodoni, A
Landscape for Loss (NFDPD Press, 2017). Winner of the 2016 Stevens Poetry
Manuscript Competition of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies.
Available in paperback and for Kindle.
Poetry
Review by Wilda Morris
If you lose
the baby you are expecting shortly before going to Vietnam where your husband
is beginning an internship, and you are stuck in a 30th floor
apartment each afternoon while your three-year-old naps, what do you do with
your time? “If you can’t have another
baby / have another city” (p. 17). Learn to love that city. While your little
one sleeps, write poetry reflecting on your personal losses and losses
resulting from the Vietnam war, and ways of healing. “Saigon. The sound of
letting go / while moving at great speed. Sigh gone / sigh gone” (p. 17).
That is
what Erin Rodoni did. She also went out on the streets, “Daughter koaloed to my hips” to explore “this city
of the young melded with / their
mopeds” (p. 20). Rodini provides some vivid pictures of Saigon where high rise
buildings were changing the skyline. It was hard to find a break traffic in
this busy, high speed city of “moped centaurs,” and thus difficult to cross the
street safely.
In the 30th floor
apartment, she explores losses: “In this latitude of air” Rodoni writes, “the
unborn hover / like mosquitoes” (p. 21). “As soon as the first / cell divides /
we grow / only by breaking” (p. 22). Brokenness comes not only through
miscarriage, though. In “A the War Remnants Museum, formerly the Museum of
American War Crimes: Unknown Soldier” (p. 23-4). Rodoni meditates on the loss
of an uncle who was an airline pilot. “. . . I am here / in the same land from
which he vanished.” She reflects that she is a person “who says atone and sacrifices nothing / but her
sleep.” While in “this room full of pictures / of what boys like him did,” she
wonders if the uncle she never knew was responsible for some of the American
misdeeds recorded by the exhibits.
Rodoni’s well-honed craft is
evident in “Elegy: Ensemble Cast” (p. 39), were she uses the word “cut” in
various forms and in several ways. The umbilical cord is cut. One life is cut
into a mosaic. The reader is told to “Cut to the payphone, the runaway holding
her breath / while her mother calls, Hello? Hello?” and to several other
poignant scenes of loss until Rodoni concludes “Keep cutting / until everything
bleeds.”
“Elegy for My Brother’s Childhood
Monster” (pp 40-41) illustrates the way one person’s gain can be another
person’s loss. When her little brother was frightened by an unidentified
monster, she would waken to find him “shipwrecked / in my bed.” She still misses
the intimacy of those moments. “Sometimes I want to get in / the car with his
childhood,” but of course, that is not possible.
Rodoni’s
last poem, “And Away” (p. 73), says that “The unborn must still be birthed.”
Her book has accomplished this birthing by her rich use of metaphor, simile,
haunting images, and well-chosen language. As Dr. Tony Barnstone, judge of the
Stevens Poetry Manuscript Competition, wrote, “It is an amazing book, one that
shows us how much can still be gained from a landscape of loss.”
Full disclosure: I am the chair of the Stevens Poetry
Manuscript Competition. In that position, I screen manuscripts, because I am
not allowed to send more than 100 to the judge. The contest judge, Tony Barnstone, is Professor of
English at Whittier, and author of 18 books. You can read about many of his accomplishments
and awards at https://www.pw.org/content/tony_barnstone.
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