and staring into the stallion’s wizard eyes, I do….”
On many levels, that sentiment encapsulates the poetry of Rhett Iseman Trull. Her first book, The Real Warnings, won the Anhinga prize a few years back. It’s a fabulous collection. Ms. Trull has a marvelous command of language, yet knows how and when to keep it simple. Many or most poems are autobiographical, even Confessional with a big C—something that doesn’t normally appeal to me. But her work, as evidenced in the line above (from “The Bells in My Skin Still Ring”), displays a daring nonchalance, a willingness to willingness to go past the point of no return, an acceptance of the need to embrace pain. And there is a good deal of pain in this collection, much of it self-inflicted. The core of the book is a long sequence, “Rescuing Princess Zelda,” that recounts the narrator’s experience in an adolescent psych ward. The sense of shared despair, of collective meaninglessness, pervades the sequence. And here, too, the poet’s gift for portraiture comes through, as the reader is introduced to several other patients who form her entourage in the hospital. Of these, “The Jumper” is perhaps the most poignant—we never quite learn what he did to land in the hospital (no pun intended), though we know what eventually happened after he got out. The poems ends with a desolate flourish:
as he strums our sad songs: industrial hum
of the lights, girls too thin to cast shadows,
grilles on the windows slicing the moon.”
The language here is wonderful—the sibilance, the connection of girls/grilles, shadows/windows, the violence of slicing the moon (even more resonant, as the speaker, just a few lines earlier, describes “those of us with scars/ across our wrists.”)
The skill of conveying a portrait, of encapsulating a life in just a few lines, is on display in several other poems, e.g., “The Night Before Depakote,” “Taking Rich for his AIDS Test,” and “Extinct Means Once They Ruled the Earth,” the last of which still haunts me (as a father, more than anything).
Though I have never met Ms. Trull, we have corresponded—she edits a wonderful poetry journal, Cave Wall, and printed one of my poems. We discovered some shared connections—for example, we were both Jarrell Fellows at UNC-G—and agreed to swap books (I think I got the better deal—and not just because hers is so much longer than mine!).
I look forward to the next one.