A Blend for Solace: Ronna Bloom’s Permiso

By Margot Lettner

First Reading, Neroli or orange blossom, for grief: A break-up collection. Do I want to read this? I have to move that chair on the front cover this weekend. Perhaps I am responding to a coincidence of therapies. Is this an appropriate reader response? But, listening to Ronna Bloom speak after her reading, is this not what she anticipates, centres this work around? Well, whether salt or ice in “This Sadness is Pitted With Love,” “Either way I am lacy; sudden filigree” (28). The pieces move in on themselves; there are many circles but few lines; things—hazelnuts, water, salt, the month of March, lilac buds, boats—move round to other shapes and purposes yet keep a certain essence. “Tincture” affirms this blend for solace, that “People move out of our bodies /and a trace remains. Homeopathic. /A drop of x under the tongue” (31).

She is using I, unabashedly and in mourning. Is the age of confessional not critically, politically past? I am moving to other pronouns. She stays in “The Burning Room” where candles stay lit between she and he: “You are leaving the burning room of your life /to go next door where it’s cool. // Come back. / We are not done” (18).

Comes the poem “Exodus,” its plagues yet of my own making: the personal demons of indecisiveness, doubt, and fear backstopped by “All the original divine plagues including bugs, darkness. / The unseen chemical ones. / The impossibility of preparing well enough. / Not trusting we’ll get what we need” (20). Then there is “Cara Sposa,” the accompanist, that dear wife of murderous music:

I wished she would stop,

she was giving me something

I needed. I was crazy

to go in for that sort of medicine.

It seemed to make things worse.

. . .

Being saved was not the answer.

Being alone with

those killing angels was. (104-105)

Where is that chair?

More Readings, Blue Tansy, for release: I return, permiso. I’ve dipped in and around this book, forward and reverse. Have given it a rumble. Its spareness unfolds a surprise: its richness is not so much on the page, in the visual and aural texture of its word play; but in what it pulls out of you, what it suggests to you, the images and responses that well in whatever part of you its text prints. Allow me, it says, to bother you, make you put your own language on the page.

Three poems now in the spirit of Canadian hemlock, for shelter and transition.

“Tree House”: “Never so at home / in a tree, never even climbed one. / By deign of imagination and a stranger, / and the willingness to follow this divining rod /inside my chest, managed to land here, / lie down and continue” (54). Reading this back, I see that I’ve spelled “diving rod,” which I now correct but relish its syllabic irony as invention.

“Oral Exam”: “Today is beautiful and green and yellow / and inquisitive as my love” (53). Well, this just sends me. “Forgive me,” this lover says, “I put two fingers in and opened your petals / like an intrusion. I meant to be loving. I did not know / what to do with my curiosity and you were scented” (53). My friend Elisa Gilmour recently photographed two hands exchanging an old family negative over a kitchen table. Her frame fills with pools of green and yellow light—at the window, in the mirror, from the brass candlesticks, on the negatives themselves—they open the moment like Ronna’s petals. Permiso sends me there.

“House/Boat”:

Every day there are new ships:

the Titanic, the Queen Mary. Black and white

photographs hung wherever there’s space.

And us with the salt and pepper,

between us the simple potatoes.

Everything is adjustment. Listing

to one side, then the other. Salt, honey.

I don’t know. (70-71)

The notion of listing to balance; the notion of listing as noting; the seasonal adjustments to get to the simple potatoes between two people; the simple uncertainty of some blend of salt and honey.

I am not a Romantic, Permiso says, not blown with gossamer; not wild about fern or pleasuring a bright star. Not really Modern or Postmodern, certainly not broadly in common cause or polemic, not an Everyman rising. And as an Everywoman, feminist riding some deep rolling wave?—hold that one in air for a while. Perhaps, Permiso says, I’m personal and personified, part rose to soothe the heart, part rosewood to harmonize. Maybe I sit in a Keatsian prototype chair, “…capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”¹ Perhaps I’m as large as you let me be.