Poetry Club – Trisia Eddy Woods and Rhea Tregebov
It’s delightful chance that the two books with which I start my inaugural “Poetry Club” post have covers that coordinate so well. As luck would also have it, before writing this post I opened the book by Jan Zwicky titled, Once Upon a time in the West: Essays on the Politics of Thought and Imagination. The first essay is on Auden and how poets think. That book deserves a future post of its own, but in it Zwicky says, “I believe that what we perceive when we perceive being is resonance: the resonance of individual things with others, and the resonance of the whole and the resonance of the whole in individual things.” Zwicky quotes Anne Michaels, who says, “A poem can give us night vision: getting used to the dark we begin to make things out.”
These quotations are a good warm-up for thinking about Rhea Tregebov’s Talking to Strangers and Trisia Eddy Woods’ A Road Map for Finding Wild Horses.
The opening poem in Talking to Strangers is titled “What We are Left.” It details those things left in a child’s burial site 2000 years ago, because “they didn’t want you to be alone.” The grief from those objects reaches forward into the present “a grief 2000 years long.” In another poem, “Metal Fatigue,” we are given the wearing out of an old ironing board. This kind of fatigue is so relatable. As it gives up the ghost, “No wonder it didn’t sigh. No one wants to listen to you / complain. Nobody wants to know how tired you are.”
Poems often talk about what it is to live, to be a body in the world, and how we experience loss. Poems can time travel, and they can be a flashlight, lighting up dark spaces. They can help us figure out how the world works. In another poem Tregebov writes, “Though I don’t know how planes work / I fly.”
I’m very fond of poems about things, as you might know, and in one titled “Second Generation” there is the very relatable (esp for anyone with aging parents) opening line, “You want to keep everything.” And the poem goes on to list things that are empty (“plastic-wrapped blank mini-cassettes), tin cans. The poem itself holds the things it describes — unknowable people in photos, the illegible script of an old sweatshirt that has flaked off. And isn’t this the beauty of poetry? The ability to be a clear jar that we can hold and turn in our hands and observe all these mysterious pieces of a life. All together the bits make some sense for a moment if held up to a light, turned this way and that. And then, that knowing can often bring a clarity to a point in our own life — perhaps to something that will happen in the future even….
A poem titled “Voice Mail” is a message from a 92 year old mother saying “I’m going out singing” and “You might not be able to reach me tonight.” How simultaneously zestful and poignant!
This is just a taste of Tregebov’s book, which also includes two wonderful series which give shape to the collection. The section “Talking to Strangers” is just that, and honours the lives of those humans you just happen to meet and who share a sliver of their life or whose life you are unexpectedly and briefly let into. The stories are related with dignity, awe, and tenderness. Another section, “Tastes,” reminded me a little of some Jane Hirshfield poems, the titles, are “Bitter,” “Umami,” “Salt,” etc. And I think this is a lovely thing about poetry — the way it can speak to other poems, poets calling to poets, through time and across distances. They can ripple and resonate and we can hear poets talking to each other perhaps unbeknownst.
I’ve known Trisia Eddy Woods since university undergrad days, and I’ve always admired her spirit, and her creativity. We have a lot in common and even have worked in a couple of the same jobs (stationery store and library). We also both grew up with horses, though Trisia still makes horses a part of her life. She is a remarkable and awe inspiring photographer of horses of all sorts, including the wild horses in her book. Before you do anything else, I would recommend looking at some of her photographs here and here.
You’ll see that I also blurbed her book, so you know I’m deeply invested in the whole project! I’ve loved seeing a person I love come into her own creatively and give the world such an inspiring gift.
The book is about someone questing, looking, seeing deeply, perceiving, perceiving! There is that childhood love of looking at and being with horses, wild ones, especially! But while there is the joy of finding and photographing horses, Eddy Woods takes us to places that have been brutalized by destructive forces made worse by climate change. It really is a book of witness, on multiple levels. The amazing thing that she does is hold things side by side: the reader gets to live vicariously and (in my case anyway) live out some childhood dreams while also becoming more aware of what’s happening to the landscape now.
In a poem “Light sources,” TEW goes on an excursion with her daughter which is the daughter’s first time out on one of these sojourns. It’s a magical encounter, all the creatures human and animal breathing together. The flies and mosquitoes are pesky though. The poem ends, “The sun catches the mosquitoes in my lens and turns / them into points of light. We stand tenderly with our feet / in the water.”
We are given all of it — the beauty, the bonding, the magic, the light, but we also have feet in water, the swishing away of bugs. And isn’t that how life goes? A little of everything all at once.
The poems journey into the actual wilderness, but perhaps the more poignant journey is inward. In “Finding wild horses” we hear of the mechanics and impetus for these treks to photograph the horses. It was originally imagined as something romantic, something tricky. “I wanted the search to be difficult.” But: “Instead, I became aware of how much of my untamed self I / was missing.” There is the inevitable mother-guilt of leaving behind husband and kids to become an adventurer, but also the realization that “Perhaps my obsession fed us all.” And that “maybe I emerged.” (This book attests, yes! certainly!) There is a quiet and abiding courage felt throughout these poems that I really just want to hold on to and be inspired by in an ongoing way.
A poem like “December come to an end” seems so timely for me. Because just as in winter, “the horses find ways to survive this suspended existence,” so do we, so will we. That is the hope. We even have a new-discovered word:
“I thought there needed to be a new word for the luminosity
which appears when we are bound in our small dome of ice:
colden. I discovered it is both a verb (to grow or make cold)
and an adjective (an alternative of golden).
We are colden.”
The places where photography meets poetry are of particular interest to me. A poem like “Depth of Field” really delights me. There is a struggling to attain the desired angles, the awkward and uncomfortable positioning of the photographer, “I lay on mounds of fescue / grass” “I could feel / winter melting beneath me, / seeping into denim.” But: “if you move your body / you can capture the light as it shatters.”
It feels as though we are seeing thrice, through the poetry, through the eyes of the poet, and through the lens.
The book begins with an author’s note which is: “If you can’t stop dreaming about horses, the answer is to think about them throughout the day as well.” And so maybe yet another way of seeing, through the dream lens.
For me, both of these collections contain so many ideas, lines, images, that resonate. I know I’ll be picking them up in future again, when I want to revisit an image or moment. When I want a poem to help me think through something in my own life.
If you have questions for the poets, leave them in the comments and I’ll pass them along. After you’ve read the poems, please do come back and leave some thoughts on what resonated for you. And thanks for reading the first post in my “poetry club” offerings!
Poetry book club questions:
1. Can you think of a time when an object (such as the ironing board in Tregebov’s poem) reflected your inner state of being?
2. Have you had a conversation with a stranger that has stayed with you?
3. Did you have a childhood obsession which you revisited in adulthood?
4. Have you had the experience of witnessing something that was so beautiful in the natural world while at the same time as experiencing pain?
5. A more general question: is there a poem you’ve read that you keep with you or near you (or even have memorized) that acted as a light in the dark for you?
