Reviewed by Emily Scudder
Lately I have been reading poet Laura Rodley’s chapbook Rappelling Blue Light. I carry it in my bag, stick blue post-it notes on poems. There is something I really like about this chapbook, and for a while I’ve been trying to fix a term to this feeling. And it is a feeling. Then I recalled, and not by chance, a poem in Of Separateness & Merging by poet Ellen Bass. The poem is titled “This poem is dedicated” and here are some lines:
…Remember this when they tell you your days aren’t lofty enough, are too personal, not universal
…there are millions of women, just like me, writing from the
everyday truth of their lives, telling the stories of half the human race…
...We are inevitable.
Rappelling Blue Light is inevitable. Rodley has a woman’s range and absolutely no agenda – there is nothing exclusive here. To quote Annie Dillard - "How we spend our days, of course, is how we spend our lives." Rodley has this figured out. A friend in chemo, a dog long gone, a daughter’s coming of age, caregiving a dying parent, a walk to mailbox, the color of the road – it’s life, isn’t it? Not all of it is everyone’s, but enough is. And then she inserts a logger. Where did he come from? Rodley is good at this twist. She mixes it up, steps into boots besides her own, as in the poem “Crashing” - one of her best:
The logger does not ponder his need to be needed
While he chainsaws open the heart of the red oak,
Cuts out a v-sized chunk, then braces his feet
Into the ground on the oak’s opposite side and
Guides the chainsaw, slicing all the way through,
the tree crashing exactly where he had planned.
He does not miss his children needing him;
He was always gone, sawing, working alone
In the woods, driving his truck over frozen ground…
While he chainsaws open the heart of the red oak,
Cuts out a v-sized chunk, then braces his feet
Into the ground on the oak’s opposite side and
Guides the chainsaw, slicing all the way through,
the tree crashing exactly where he had planned.
He does not miss his children needing him;
He was always gone, sawing, working alone
In the woods, driving his truck over frozen ground…
When she wastes no words, bears down on what’s in her view, Rodley’s poems are spot on, as in her description of the road in the poem “New Morning” –
The road is a piebald horse’s skin,
the pressed mud, liver colored, the
discs of pressed salt: lichens.
the pressed mud, liver colored, the
discs of pressed salt: lichens.
Not all the poems in Rappelling Blue Light are as finely tuned however. Some loosen up and lose me, get too prose-like, but I don’t dwell on them and it is easy not to. Why? Laura Rodley gathers up not just a collection of poems in this chapbook, but maybe even more so, a kind of mood: caring, observant, connected. I'm hooked, not to specific poems or lines, but to the endeavor. From the poem “Caregiver”
I do not know if right now
you will choke
and I will have to watch
your life leave in blueness
if you cannot catch your breath;
you are on DNR orders,
I could not breathe my life
into your lips to save you.
you will choke
and I will have to watch
your life leave in blueness
if you cannot catch your breath;
you are on DNR orders,
I could not breathe my life
into your lips to save you.
After the blue post-its have been removed from my favorites of Rodley’s poems, I might just shelve Rappelling Blue Light next to Ellen Bass’ On Separateness and Merging, as a reminder of where we have been, and how far we’ve come.
