Dames Rocket
What a wonderful book this is! Turning its pages, time and again I felt the kind of astonishment a person feels as her soul comes to consciousness. To read these poems is to experience an awakening, to be suddenly attentive to the odd fact of being a self in a strange world. This is a remarkable book, written by a splendid poet who is right now at her very best. --Jeanne Murray WalkerElaine Terranova's Dames Rocket is a numinous, luminous, and raw exploration of space: the balloon of air between here and there that holds our gods, our aspirations, and our own delicate bodies. It is the space of her childhood street, it s a phoebe s nest, it s an apricot, it s the hunger moon. Her "An Ars Poetica" says Poetry "is where you were headed/ while the world was pointing/ in the opposite direction." Over and over I find, in this new collection of poems, that I've waked up in a place where I'm glad and surprised to be. --Fleda BrownReaders have been enjoying Elaine Terranova's subtly marvelous poems since before her book The Cult of the Right Hand won the Walt Whitman Award in 1990; but although her individual poems reach a wide audience through literary journals, Dames Rocket is only her fifth full-length collection in those 22 years. She deserves more readers, and her latest book offers excellent work as an introduction to her poetry as well as for readers who've appreciated her previous collections.Certain writers (Stanley Kunitz comes to mind) manage to write memoir-style poetry that feels both personal and universal, that tells the story not just of a person but of an era. Terranova accomplishes this feat with fluid ease. There is more to a poem like "Broken Line" than the term lyrical narrative suggests: the speaker begins by addressing the intimate you, opens with the lyrical secret "family made me feel/like a broken line," but immediately moves the reader out from the child's lonely experience into the wider world of air raids, the war. The story's condensed, years sketched in short lines, and ends with an image of connectedness that feels unexpected and entirely right. "Morph," "For Luck," "Orphanage," and "Corset" are among the poems that operate with this gentle turning into and away from childhood where "the moon itself//is an aide memoire."That gentle turning is evident in other poems here, as well, in poems more strictly lyrical and in which Terranova seems attuned to the exquisite balance necessary for the reader to enter the reflective mode of the poem s speaker. Many of her poems shift slightly in the last phrase or stanza. It is seldom a huge shift, a major twist unbalancing the reader but more like the movement of a tai chi practitioner: weight shifted from one leg to another only after ascertaining that the change in balance will be supported. After watching phoebes fledge, and listening to their calls, the speaker moves toward the reader as well as inward towards herself by acknowledging, "I'd do it too/to know who I am/in the vastness of day." In this collection, Terranova offers up the image of being-in-the-world in numerous ways, serving the reader with an array of lovely, reflective poems by a mature and inquisitive writer who continues to view the world and its denizens, animate or not, with a kind of non-judgmental awe: "the potential in fire/an instruction manual of aspiration/always becoming." She looks at art with the same curiosity, the same careful perspective, in her ekphrastic poems such as "Prendergast," "Zip" and "Moonlight: Boulogne."Of particular note is the "balloon" series of poems that appears in section IV of Dames Rocket. The group begins with "Enter the Balloon," in which the mysterious object appears "incognito, slightly surreal," caught in the trees. We learn the balloon doesn't mind being alone, that it has urges and desires in its "meandering mind." The personification works without becoming heavy-handed because Elaine Terranova has such a sure, light touch. She observes that "pressured, a person/could learn from the balloon,/learn to yield as the balloon/yields, find another way." Indeed, these nine poems might serve well as a text for meditation, almost a guide to life.Perhaps that is the sum of what Terranova's poems do so well in this book: to remind us of our consciousness. The awakening in this collection reminds me of how I wake on the best mornings of my life slowly and attentively as the sun rises, as the birds begin their singing, aware of my body in the world, the only world I know. Reading Dames Rocket, I feel convinced by Terranova's world as she reveals it, line by elegant line, in these fine poems. --Ann E. Michael