In the Absence of Birds (Cervena Barva Press, 2024) by Ruth C. Chad

 

In the Absence of Birds (Cervena Barva Press, 2024) by Ruth C. Chad

REVIEW BY LEE VARON

In this exquisite collection, poet Ruth Chad interweaves her keen attention to the details of our natural world with deep emotions of love, loss, joy, and grief.

Many of the poems in this collection (divided into three sections) focus on the poet’s mother who suffered from Alzheimer’s before she succumbed to the disease in her 90s. These poems read like journal entries with often just dates for titles

I imagine witnessing a loved one fall into the depths of dementia must be heart-wrenching as one sees the person becoming unmoored from their former life. Chad captures this brilliantly in such poems as:

April 24:

Last night I dreamt of mermaids

in the surf

on the white

wild mane of the waves

and floating mussels

with no flesh

no byssus attached

Byssus refers to the protein threads that attach mollusks, such as mussels, to solid surfaces.

What a perfect image of her mother, a shell of her former self, totally unable to attach to anything in the world around her.

Chad is not afraid to plumb the complexities of the mother/daughter relationship. In If Only, she laments the strictures of her mother’s life.

…Long after her death

I will wish

that my mother had been freed

of the yellow walls

of our split level

that she could have walked

calmly away

from the turquoise kitchen

apron trailing behind her in the grass

that she could have walked

calmly away

into the moonrise

and left a path

for me

Chad’s poems are a testament of how we go on, how we manage devastating things and come to terms with them. One thing poetry can do so well is help us survive difficult times and certainly Chad’s poems provide this solace. Through her poetry, she illustrates how it feels to see a loved one slip into illness and infirmity, but she also shows us how one takes in the fullness of another’s life and, in so doing, transmutes this loss into a triumph of the spirit.

These poems are artfully crafted with deceptive simplicity. Often, Chad dispenses with punctuation altogether and the beauty of her words on the page shines forth with its power and resonance. Most of these poems are no longer than a page and among these the poet intersperses haiku and other short poems which serve to crystallize her message as in this poem after her mother’s passing:

February 14

I cried when I dropped the teacup

robin’s egg blue

shattered shards of china

on my kitchen floor

it was yours

No extra words slow the conveyance of the deep emotion in such poems.

There are poems in this collection about travel, the process of aging, and about other family members. All of these are imbued with Chad’s keen attention to the natural world and breathtaking images as in lines from Life in the Pandemic:

A hundred sparrows

gather in the firs flutter

against each other

feathers bronze umber

their chatter

fills the lilac sky…

And in another poem Ice After a Storm, the poet writes:

I shudder

in chill crusty morning

awed by the cold fist of sun

and how small I am

standing here

under the great loud beeches

like a girl in the circus crowd

the wild universe

whirling around me

Certainly, the poems in this enduring collection engender an equal sense of awe.

Lee Varon is a social worker and writer. Her latest poetry book is The Last Bed (2024). She has written two children’s books about substance use disorder: My Brother is Not a Monster: A Story of Addiction and Recovery (2021) and: A Kids Book About Overdose (2024).