Review: Ross's Vinland

The Pill is willing to admit – can see no shame in it – that he is probably influenced by the opinions of those whose opinions he respects. The whole reviewing racket, after all, is premised on the assumption that one’s opinions might influence someone, somewhere. More concerning to the Pill is the possibility that his opinions are unduly influenced by antagonism to those whose opinions he’s never cared for. Either way, one wants to think one’s mind is one’s own. So as I read a handful of newish books from Four Way, which I can do now that the semester is over, the grades are in, the cap and gown are hung back up until next May, I wonder whether I’d like Monica Youn’s Ignatz better without one of its blurbs (by a grad-school writing group buddy of the poet’s, though of course this, natch, is left unstated), and whether I’d like Jamie Ross’s Vinland less without its endorsement by Brigit Kelly (who judged the competition for the Four Way Books Intro Prize). Kelly is not only a poet gifted with the capacity to cast keen observations into the kind of precise language that etches enzyme pathways through the neural network; she is also a generous reader – in multiple senses: she devotes time during her own readings to the poems of other poets, she takes time to read with care and comment with encouragement, insight, and rigor on the efforts of graduate students who really shouldn’t bother her with such things (I was one such fortunate neophyte), and, it turns out, she gets right to the heart of a project like Ross’s.

Kelly’s citation (it deserves a better name than “blurb,” and is really something like a prose poem itself) repeats terms that, as well as any, give a sense of what Ross is up to in Vinland: dreams, visions, rhythms. A visual artist as well as a poet, Ross is concerned with perception and what warps it, with the representation of the perceived, the rendering of the real into the angles, curves, and intersections that might convey it to a second-hand perceiver. These concerns manifest themselves not only in the subjects of some of these poems (“El Niño,” or “Infinite Physics, Infinite Hand,” or “Flyer” or “Treehouse”), which are about painting or the view from one standpoint or another, but also, and more importantly, in Ross’s handling of language and those units – the word, the phrase, the line – that are poetry’s cognates for the painter’s color, modeling, and plane. Check out, for example, this stanza from the title poem:

I say it is rain, for the rooster. And the fog,
and the dispersion of the small. And I say
it is rain for the sound of despair. For
the clutched breath in a child’s dream
when the mare goes blind and licks
a wound. For the light I cannot reach. For
my father is building his boat.

Note the first line’s insistence on artifice; we don’t see rain, we see the saying that “it is rain.” And this is attached not to a cause (it’s cloudy) or to evidence (there are drops falling from the sky), but to a non sequitur in the form of an adverbial phrase. This is no more about rain than “The Red Wheel Barrow” is about a wheelbarrow. It is, instead, about “rain,” and the ways the word connects – through sound to “rooster,” through the discourse of climate to “fog,” through the family resemblance to other droplet-like things in “the dispersion of the small.” The third sentence then takes sonic resemblance to re-interprets it as affective resemblance. The next sentence elaborates despair through concrete emblems. The repeated “for the” structure establishes a pattern that is broken by the stanza’s concluding sentence, which uses a word that appears to be the same (“for”) in a different grammatical sense (here as a synonym for “because”). What I’m getting at is that Ross is using language here in a way that foregrounds the substance itself rather than the objects, relationships, attitudes, etc., that everyday language (and too much contemporary poetry) is supposed simply to reveal.


Sometimes, the poems work through perception to moments of fairly clear narrative or meditation. In “The Most Handsome Man in America,” the speaker reads a photograph first in terms of objects in space (“We see the bottom of a car, parked / at the top”), then in terms of familial history (the photograph depicts the speaker’s parents), and, finally, in terms of that history’s emotional and thematic significance. These are fine performances of a standard poetic progression. I find myself much more powerfully drawn, though, to the poems in which I’m much less sure about what’s going on, in which the important relationships are those established among phrases and images themselves rather than among those things toward which they are supposed to point. In “Coal Seam,” for instance:

I’m out, the night again. The field. New growth
over September. Some black straw. Some burnt wheat.
Strange sun in a glass-fire.

Olivia was here. No cuts she said, it was your sweater. You
never knew how leaves could smolder. Never broke a slag-heap

for timbers in this cabin. No one asks, weren’t they green –
I chinked them, who would care?

Is there a picture here, a narrative? Sure, and with some interpretive pressure and guess work both can be sketched. But I don’t think either the picture or the story is the locus of the poem’s power (and it’s got power). Instead, phrases are repeated in ways that call out a current of subterranean significance. “No cuts” recurs later, for example, and connects with “two / lines of blood,” itself the third in a series of figures, to lend a violence to what is being described (mining), that then slants the word “blade,” here referring to grass, in the semantic direction of knives or axes. The black straw and burnt wheat of the first lines, the glass-fire and smoldering leaves, similarly exert a linguistic gravitational pull on later words and phrases.

Throughout Vinland, Ross wonderfully plays language against itself, exploits the inherent multiplicity of meanings, through these painterly tricks of juxtaposition and patterned repetition. Dreams, visions, rhythms. Indeed.