Blue Atlas, Susan Rich
Red Hen Press, 2024
I first came to meet Susan Rich, and to read her poetry, in Summer 2012, on a writing retreat at the Anam Cara Writers’ and Artists’ Retreat in Eyeries, County Cork, Ireland. I signed up for her ekphrastic poetry workshop, which ran a week, and for which I will always be grateful. I’ve been an admirer of her work ever since. Her most recent book, Blue Atlas, documents a challenging childhood, a yearning for the world of travel and exploration, and tells the story of an unplanned pregnancy and abortion. This is a collection that speaks of a fully led life, one leapt into with curiosity and a keen desire to learn more about the world and its people. It’s also a collection that has, as its centre, a pinpoint of loss that ripples outwards, and a poetic reflection that questions the complexity of life’s experiences.
The poet begins the collection by documenting what it feels like to experience an abortion that is not of their choosing. In the poem, “Arborist/Abortionist,” it’s revealed that the abortion was arranged “by anxious relatives” who wished for a “disappearing act,” and that the doctor “extracted the troublesome little branch/that obscured the golden overlook.” The one thing that would certainly change the landscape of a life is removed. In “Metaphors,” the metaphor continues to build as there are references to the fetus as an “unfinished dance step—unripe mango;/an infinitesimal beansprout cut back/to the nub” and of how it feels to engage with the conundrum “of choice/no choice.” There are, too, references back to the Blue Atlas Cedar tree that is native to the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. A gymnosperm, “the Blue Atlas has neither flowers nor fruits. It is the hardiest species and can reproduce spontaneously from seeds.” The metaphor of this particular tree, along with other plant images and metaphors, is one that the poet weaves through the collection.
In a section titled, “Compass of Desire,” Rich creates an archive of past lovers. In the poem, “No One Knew,” the poet conjures the electric magic of first love at sixteen, with the speaker remembering how “He appled and oranged me afternoons/in his bedroom.” The two “were each/other’s first what? Our idea of what might be?” Another poem, “Anatomy of Desire at the Cactus Café,” captures the intensity of the magnetic pull that exists between two lovers, an indescribable attraction that cannot be denied, with the poet writing: “I’d still tip my mojito to the muse of hands//almost meeting, shoulders nearly touching—/the desire for human pretzels rising above//our heads in little thought balloons.” The lovers become “weed-wild and wonderous—//a page torn from a blue pocket notebook/or the first hum of a feral embrace.” Here is a poet who uses language, and brilliantly crafted poetry, to paint a vivid and artistic picture inside the reader’s mind and heart. She moves from documenting past loves to working through a series of pieces that become a post-abortion narrative.
Loss permeates the poetic fabric of Blue Atlas. The poem “Once Mother and Father Were Buried,” the second in the section titled “Apparitions,” is a witnessing of what happens after we lose major figures in our lives, in terms of how the things they leave behind become artifacts of a life: “After the garlic press, the musical penny bank,/the silverware from a rosewood box/were presented, argued over, stripped bare—” and “after the claiming of the Seder plate, inlaid Aladdin table, and father’s Hamilton watch,” the question arises as to “what did we learn of belongings?” The reader sits uncomfortably, knowing the tug of war that occurs between siblings after parental deaths. One possibility is “total sibling divorce, division, and “lives cracking open.” This section of the book deals with the ghosts of loss. Here are dead parents who haunt, and a “ghost-child” spoken of as “little biscuit, lemon peel,” as well as a former love who slams the door and leaves silence behind him as “a fast-forming habit that untied its shoelaces,/sank into the loveseat and prepared to stay/up with me all night,” to a tiny bee or yellow jacket that stings and departs, so that “all I have left//of him is a raised scar, burning like a silver dollar.” Yes, I kept thinking as I read through Blue Atlas, this is exactly what loss of all incarnations is like. It wounds, scars, and haunts you for the rest of your life, and so you are forced to wrestle with it for as long as you live.
It makes perfect sense, then, that Rich references a well-known and loved American poet (who is sometimes claimed by Canada, as well) in “Compass” when she writes: “Elizabeth Bishop often kept a compass/in her small jacket pocket,” as she “regularly fell from a delicate/map of sobriety, lost her keys, entire weeks—even countries.” Rich suggests, near the end of the poem, that perhaps “her brokenness could orient her” to move forward from great loss and grief. This is what Rich does in all her work in Blue Atlas—she nudges her reader to see the world in all its detailed sorrow and joy, creates images and metaphors that paint visual art on the page, and reminds them that life is complex, challenging, and richly rewarding. Our tenacity as humans is honoured in these poems, as well.
What will most stay with me as a reader is the idea that the poems of Blue Atlas speak to the need to not search frantically for closure or try to box up past experiences into categories. Our lives are timelines like the plots we read in novels, but they are never linear ones. In “String Theory with Heartache,” the poet writes: “But what if the point/is not the point? Under the world’s microscope we see that//no picture frame, no old love, no sigh/actually stays still.” In the places where we experienced trauma in our younger lives and incarnations—whether locked in dark attics by siblings, or in dealing with the ripple effect of pregnancies that have been ended, or in dealing with the expectations and social pressures of our parents’ inherited religions—we hope for some sort of clarity. The place where we might find peace comes from our acceptance that our paths, our life choices, have been complex and often painful. In “Binocular Vision,” there is a poignant sense of ‘what if’ that hovers above the words, as the speaker wonders whether the “zygote/who never becomes” might be “a geologist or lounge singer.” The poem ends with the speaker defining herself as “half-mother,//half-old crone, longing for/my lovely disembodied—my dear, body of a boy.” In all our human gains and losses, and in our learning, we are haunted by absences that we must learn to live with as we continually move forward. This is what Susan Rich’s Blue Atlas has reminded me—to be kind to younger incarnations of myself, to be mindful of each moment I’m here, and to show compassion to myself and others.
Kim Fahner lives and writes
in Sudbury, Ontario. Her latest full collection of poems is Emptying the
Ocean (Frontenac House, 2022) and she's just published a poetry chapbook, Fault
Lines and Shatter Cones (Emergency Flash Mob Press, 2023). She is the First
Vice-Chair for The Writers' Union of Canada (2023-25), a member of the League
of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada.
Kim's first novel, The Donoghue Girl, has just been published by
Latitude 46 Publishing. She may be reached via her author website at
www.kimfahner.com