Indeed I Was Pleased With The World is Mary Ruefle’s tenth book of poetry. It is an exercise in the contradictions of the mutually exclusive (or what typically is, anyway–) the conversational and the prophetic, the temporal and the permanent, the ironic with the earnest, the flip paired with the maxim, the strange with the intimate. Mostly working in a single stanza form, with a blend of narrative and associative styles, it is clear to me how much Ruefle is her own in the contemporary American literary landscape. Her peculiarity strikes me as her finest trait; in a landscape where we bemoan the prevailing aesthetic and the prevalence of a ho-hum, indistinguishable poetry, it’s her weirdness, her own way of seeing and understanding, that magnetizes and pulls.
Take, for instance, this excerpt her poem “Grief:”
First, it will comfort you to know there are crows.
And calipers for measuring the amount of sunshire
that can escape from under the shadows
of thought. Far out at sea ships go down
in a crippled light, and bunches of black iris
are sent to the remaining crew.
You, too, shall have lived and died
a jot, with the queer feeling you were vast and
ageless, with a good education in sleep, prepared
to die with one regret, that you could not devote
more years in vain.
The first line is written in such a way that it suggests a prior intimacy–that the speaker knows us pretty well, and to soften the blow of what comes next, assures us that there will be crows. The intimacy is a surprise, and it makes the crows, as well as the caliper’s precision, a relief.
But it also invites trust–so though the world Ruefle creates may be strange, the voice in it is one that acts like a friend’s voice. It knows our regrets, even if we don’t.
A teasingly confessional voice has the same sway, from “How I Became Impossible:”
I was born shy, congenitally unable to do anything
profitable, to se anything in color, to love plums,
with a marked aversion to traveling around the room,
which is perfectly normal in infants.
Who wrote this? were my first words.
The poem goes on to debunk the idea that penguins and polar bears had grown up in cahoots, “sharing the same vistas.” Only later did the speaker learn that each is native to entirely opposite ends of the earth–one to the Arctic, and one native to Antarctica. Fully understanding this, the poems ends “I realized I was becoming / impossible, more and more impossible / and that one day it would really be true.” It is a bizarre and tender poem–one eye winks ironic, and the other could be locked on you, trusting you enough to share a vulnerability of great proportion. It is as if we are sitting in a treehouse, and the voice in the poem is telling us a secret. What a peculiar thing to be conscious of! To have thought enough about this defining trait to articulate it. What should one do with such a secret but treasure it?
There are flatter moments, but on the whole, the book operates with contradiction at it’s core. Here’s a last gift from the book, a poem called “That is the Question:”
Birds grow in the garden here–
their little beaks push up the dirt
and the oxygen stuns their beady eyes,
a feather unfurls on the stalk of a neck
and in the darkness
of the early hours of April 30th
a breast so bright it could swallow a bee–
even so, there’s a universal dread
right here in our own quarter-acre–
what if the dead come next?
And want breakfast?
And to divide the light?
To see flowers as birds and imagine that through–Hamlet, what the hell were you thinking? You, too, shall have lived and died a jot.