Book Review: The Beds by Martha Rhodes
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The Beds Poems by Martha Rhodes |
| Autumn House Press, 2012 $14.95 |
In her fourth collection of poems, Martha Rhodes examines illness, love, the infidelity of the body, and “The pleasures and inconveniences of being detested.” This, the title of the twelfth poem in her collection The Beds, begins with frailty, meanders through the doctor’s office around “friends tired of all the errands and schlepping” to end on a humorous note, setting the tone of breakdown and amusement that underscores this book:
Broken leg
Broken leg
And broken leg again.
And 81 stairs.
Despite the difficulty of caring for an ailing loved one, or caring for themselves, Rhodes’ speakers share an unwavering sense of grit and humor, and the poet’s ability to work from abstract title through bone (and heart) breaks and line breaks to clear image often brings the reader to a muscle-clenching moment of understanding. This sense of connection is sometimes so subtle it may be missed on the first read.
This is the case with “Thrombosis,” “A rat carried this week to us between its teeth and dropped it at our feet…And the rat will find its way to us here, too, where at the hospital I hold onto your foot lest you be rolled away without me…today I am able to eat every doughnut New York City offers.” Rhodes with another story within a story, the connotation of doughnuts and roundness and illness gelling together in an instant at the end:
My grandfather was a baker from Vienna. Perhaps he’d say to me today, Doughnuts are in your blood. And what should I say about your blood, dear, not knowing yet what’s in your blood that brings us here this week.
Without a doubt, Rhodes’ poems are curious and provocative, like a small animal scratching at the window. Her simple, quick lines create a sense of immediate imagery, urging the imagination to run like a fever unchecked. And as the sound and mouth feel of her words works its way inside, the symbiotic relationship of reader and writer, of experienced and imagined, consumes the reader.
On the surface, Rhodes’ poems are about the natural processes of separation and loss, illness and grief and the mirthful capacity to overcome reality. Weaving imagery of the domestic life and the human implements of hospitals and houseplants into the earthy textures of the world beyond, Rhodes yields a quiet, uncanny power over nature unknown to most humans.
In “Fog Horn,” for instance, the gauzy language of disorientation pulls at the reader’s senses.
The first stanza, “The sheet’s dark-on-dark pattern, / a flat dull sea, calm enough,” pulls readers into a quiet, dark seabed of solitude. But as the couplets progress, the speaker becomes unsettled, then solid, leaving the reader with a sense of direction.
I’ve begun my own noise—
of warning—a trembling at first,
then persistent, even confident,
through the night’s steady fog.
Rhodes continues drawing upon the natural world in “The Gathered,” layering the detritus of a stalled river and a stalled life until the physical image pushes the mind to a new reality.
The river sludge hardens and cracks.
We pitch tents in mile-long rows.
We’re camped above, too tired to press
one more step; we sleep in fits—
the gnats, the howlings, the mess
of our lives brought in our eyes and lit
before us, our precious disasters.
…we deserve this rot
and roll in it, thrive in it, and in turn
welcome those who follow us. Need a bed?
Rest here with us, friend. End of the line.
Dead end.
While Rhodes’ perception of the physical world lends itself to the hardscrabble life of the outdoors, that sense of emotion, fragility and strength comes through best when she relates the physical world to the natural process of stagnation, decay, creation and existence as it applies to the personal. The best poems in this fifty-four page collection explore death, absence and illness, and create meaning for those facing or remaining after, a final absence. Readers will search for the underlying connotation of each poem, and with each new reading the poems will reveal something new of themselves, in much the same way a wound’s appearance changes with each unbandaging.
Martha Rhodes is the author of At the Gate, Perfect Disappearance (Green Rose Prize), and Mother Quiet. Her poems have been published in such journals as Agni, Columbia, Fence, New England Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, and TriQuarterly and anthologized in Agni 30 Years, Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women, Poem in Your Pocket (a publication of the Academy of American Poets), and It’s Not You, It’s Me. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Martha Rhodes is the director of Four Way Books in New York City.