Anele Rubin
Anele Rubin’s first book of poetry, Trying to Speak, is the best book of poems I’ve read in over a year. Rubin’s poems are both perfectly crafted and deeply resonant with a range of emotions as varied as the notes the keys on a piano can generate. Lately it seems I find books that do one or the other, but not both—they are either carefully crafted but not deep enough, or full of a raw, real truth that is, unfortunately, not conveyed in language precise or stark enough to leave me breathless. I feel awed only when the poet is engaged with a question or idea that is sustained throughout a manuscript and explored courageously and meticulously and tenderly.
Perhaps I am so drawn to the poems in Rubin’s book because they are about the struggle to be fully present in one’s own life, one of the topics I wanted to explore originally in this blog. This struggle is always present in the poems, and the poems’shapes reflect the content flawlessly. The narratives and images feel reticent, small, careful not to reveal too much.
The opening poem, “On the Corner,” sets the tone for the book by presenting the
the question of what it means to have a home, and what it means to feel. The poem is about an old, crazy woman who has lost her way home, but finally “…remembers/where to turn. She’s not the only one without/ a sense of direction or to whom happiness comes/ sometimes like a sharp pain.” The presence of happiness is not only haphazard but also defies expectations, feeling like pain instead of joy.
Sometimes, happiness cannot be accessed at all. In “Herself,” Rubin writes, “Other days she’d go by the school yard/ and feel like she could almost feel,/ like any minute she would feel/ a roundness she knew as a little girl.// But on this day what she saw did not begin to enter./ What she saw was pressing against the hole/ giving it shape.” And the poem ends, “…She felt the sun curve/ around her. She could not feel what it curved around.” In “Tonight,” she writes, “I feel like I’m at the bottom of a canyon,/ that what I know of my life is just an echo.” The speaker “tr[ies] to see clearly,/ to see through the halo to the thing,/ but it’s no use.”
But the book is not about being stuck in a place without access to emotions or to the center of oneself. It is, instead, a book about, as Toi Dericotte put it in her blurb on the back cover, “emotional resurrection.” What gets through the evenness of every day life, or through the grief that feels like emptiness, is the wonder in the ordinary. This idea that the ordinary moments of our lives are full of wonder is certainly not new, but what is new about Rubin’s presentation of this seemingly simple spiritual truth is the fact that wonder can be accessed simultaneously in both memory and the present moment without diminishing the power of either, that the ancestral power of her dead are both actually present—that is, their real lives are laid bare and raw in the poems—and spiritually present, providing a sense of hope and continuity through the sometimes troubling lineage.
In her poem “In the Local Floral Section of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden,” Rubin writes, “There are dead leaves and new blades of grass./ I am here on a log and it almost doesn’t matter.” But then she goes on to write that pieces of the speaker are wrapped around husband and child and sibling, “and a part of me/ is looking over my shoulder/ for the shadow of my mother.” But in the end, the reader is left with a sense of wonder, inaccessible in all its fullness, but real nonetheless: “Yet my body like an empty cicada shell/ hunches forward, motionless here/ as my eyes roll for pleasure/ in the dirt strewn with last year’s life/ and that bird, unseen, is singing/ what I want to say/ in a tone I will never acquire.” These lines are just a taste of the spiritual path the poems force the reader to walk, often painfully, always slowly, always with expectation.
After reading this book twice in one week, I dreamed I was a child learning to play the piano; I did not understand the reason my mother (a woman quite different from my actual mother) was so eager for me to learn, but I wanted both to please her and to master the challenge myself. Soon I was happy for the challenge, and before I knew it, the notes started to come together into a simple melody. I knew I was playing a song I’d heard before, and I knew it wasn’t a difficult song exactly, but I also recognized the depth to the music in a new way. I was puzzled by this dream at first, but then I realized that Rubin’s poems are like that, new territory that I felt forced to finish, painfully reverberating through my own losses and fears and struggles, but also evocative of the wonder I can access through the act of creation (as well as the act of sitting of still and listening).
I just returned from a vacation in California, where I visited my sister and brother-in-law and their son, who will be two in September. It has been almost a year since I last saw my little nephew. I am so in love with him in every possible way, but what is most amazing about spending time with him is how truly delighted he is at everything he sees, no matter how many times he’s seen it. He will point to the trees that are moving in the breeze outside the window he has been looking out of all of his 21 months of life and exclaim “wow!” over and over. When we are driving somewhere, or when we are pushing him in the jogger, he will point excitedly at every large vehicle, truck or tractor or SUV, and kick his legs. (This seems to be a sign that nature is at least as powerful as nurture, but that’s another topic for another blog). Every day his father walks him down to the end of the peer in Capitola village so he can see the fish in a tank there, and again and again, he will suck in his cheeks and make fish sounds and watch them with wide eyes, clapping.
I want to see the world the way he does. I wish I could sustain that joy. But I know it is a joy that gets lost when we age. Yet somehow Rubin has returned to her readers that sense of wonder as seen through adult eyes, as felt by adult hearts. Wonder is victory over the emptiness we all carry as adults, no matter what grief or fear or baggage we are pulling along behind us. I want to feel, her poems say over and over. I want to be present in my own life. And it is possible, she tells us, possible and wonderful.
Perhaps I am so drawn to the poems in Rubin’s book because they are about the struggle to be fully present in one’s own life, one of the topics I wanted to explore originally in this blog. This struggle is always present in the poems, and the poems’shapes reflect the content flawlessly. The narratives and images feel reticent, small, careful not to reveal too much.
The opening poem, “On the Corner,” sets the tone for the book by presenting the
the question of what it means to have a home, and what it means to feel. The poem is about an old, crazy woman who has lost her way home, but finally “…remembers/where to turn. She’s not the only one without/ a sense of direction or to whom happiness comes/ sometimes like a sharp pain.” The presence of happiness is not only haphazard but also defies expectations, feeling like pain instead of joy.
Sometimes, happiness cannot be accessed at all. In “Herself,” Rubin writes, “Other days she’d go by the school yard/ and feel like she could almost feel,/ like any minute she would feel/ a roundness she knew as a little girl.// But on this day what she saw did not begin to enter./ What she saw was pressing against the hole/ giving it shape.” And the poem ends, “…She felt the sun curve/ around her. She could not feel what it curved around.” In “Tonight,” she writes, “I feel like I’m at the bottom of a canyon,/ that what I know of my life is just an echo.” The speaker “tr[ies] to see clearly,/ to see through the halo to the thing,/ but it’s no use.”
But the book is not about being stuck in a place without access to emotions or to the center of oneself. It is, instead, a book about, as Toi Dericotte put it in her blurb on the back cover, “emotional resurrection.” What gets through the evenness of every day life, or through the grief that feels like emptiness, is the wonder in the ordinary. This idea that the ordinary moments of our lives are full of wonder is certainly not new, but what is new about Rubin’s presentation of this seemingly simple spiritual truth is the fact that wonder can be accessed simultaneously in both memory and the present moment without diminishing the power of either, that the ancestral power of her dead are both actually present—that is, their real lives are laid bare and raw in the poems—and spiritually present, providing a sense of hope and continuity through the sometimes troubling lineage.
In her poem “In the Local Floral Section of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden,” Rubin writes, “There are dead leaves and new blades of grass./ I am here on a log and it almost doesn’t matter.” But then she goes on to write that pieces of the speaker are wrapped around husband and child and sibling, “and a part of me/ is looking over my shoulder/ for the shadow of my mother.” But in the end, the reader is left with a sense of wonder, inaccessible in all its fullness, but real nonetheless: “Yet my body like an empty cicada shell/ hunches forward, motionless here/ as my eyes roll for pleasure/ in the dirt strewn with last year’s life/ and that bird, unseen, is singing/ what I want to say/ in a tone I will never acquire.” These lines are just a taste of the spiritual path the poems force the reader to walk, often painfully, always slowly, always with expectation.
After reading this book twice in one week, I dreamed I was a child learning to play the piano; I did not understand the reason my mother (a woman quite different from my actual mother) was so eager for me to learn, but I wanted both to please her and to master the challenge myself. Soon I was happy for the challenge, and before I knew it, the notes started to come together into a simple melody. I knew I was playing a song I’d heard before, and I knew it wasn’t a difficult song exactly, but I also recognized the depth to the music in a new way. I was puzzled by this dream at first, but then I realized that Rubin’s poems are like that, new territory that I felt forced to finish, painfully reverberating through my own losses and fears and struggles, but also evocative of the wonder I can access through the act of creation (as well as the act of sitting of still and listening).
I just returned from a vacation in California, where I visited my sister and brother-in-law and their son, who will be two in September. It has been almost a year since I last saw my little nephew. I am so in love with him in every possible way, but what is most amazing about spending time with him is how truly delighted he is at everything he sees, no matter how many times he’s seen it. He will point to the trees that are moving in the breeze outside the window he has been looking out of all of his 21 months of life and exclaim “wow!” over and over. When we are driving somewhere, or when we are pushing him in the jogger, he will point excitedly at every large vehicle, truck or tractor or SUV, and kick his legs. (This seems to be a sign that nature is at least as powerful as nurture, but that’s another topic for another blog). Every day his father walks him down to the end of the peer in Capitola village so he can see the fish in a tank there, and again and again, he will suck in his cheeks and make fish sounds and watch them with wide eyes, clapping.
I want to see the world the way he does. I wish I could sustain that joy. But I know it is a joy that gets lost when we age. Yet somehow Rubin has returned to her readers that sense of wonder as seen through adult eyes, as felt by adult hearts. Wonder is victory over the emptiness we all carry as adults, no matter what grief or fear or baggage we are pulling along behind us. I want to feel, her poems say over and over. I want to be present in my own life. And it is possible, she tells us, possible and wonderful.
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