From oustide the lines: Cormorant Beyond the Compost By Elisavietta Ritchie Cherry Grove Press, 2011
Elisavietta Ritchie's latest volume of poetry Cormorant Beyond the Compost burns with eroticism and life, and reading some of her poems is akin to watching a wick sizzle down on a firecracker, waiting for the pop, the smoke, and the final hiss.
In the first section, Saint in a Box of Glass, Ritchie's world is polarized, the artistic voice versus the real world. There is a tension that builds in the opening poem “Tradecraft in Iambic Pentameter” where “true tales remain confined within the cage/of my long skull” and continues through the first section where the speakers of these poems struggle with waking with reality, to creating one's own reality, best illustrated in “Ito Jakuchu artist b. 1716, Kyoto” where the young painter resists his father's ways, arranging vegetables in the market, soaking his senses in the fresh skin and smell of the produce for sale, his eye on the animals that cuttle and coo in their cages. Later the boy draws, and it is in these moments he is free of burden, free of being his father's son.
It's not just the artistic voice weening away from the reality, here Ritchie focuses on the natural world as it comes into focus against the backdrop of suburban and urban landscapes. “I perch on a Subaru tailgate.../then a vee of Canadian geese/flies...overhead.” A reminder, nature's appearance, be it a hawk after Tai Chi, or toad turning up in the garden, of the struggle to adapt in this modern age to a world that changes its face every few years.
Ritchie does not shy away from passion, and the backbone of Cormorant is the erotic desire that builds at the end of the first section and continues throughout the volume. Lust after all is a way to beat back death, and whether she is owner of her love, like a “Harley” in “Proprietary Codes” or lusting for the “moon-mad pull of the tide” in “The Midwesterner's Lust for the Sea,” Ritchie's speakers know courage, and face bleakness of tsunamis and hurricanes alike with a fiery and contemplative voice.
All throughout the volume, though particularly true in the section Ancestors to Die For, the speaker is an outsider. Whether looking through the scrim into death, or looking back through history at her own family, I imagine Ritchie to be some mad cheerleader for passion, stealing blackberries, loving a dying friend, or recuperating from a bad mushroom trip, all the while refusing to give up, to be satiated.
Throughout the seven sections that make up Cormorant, Ritchie roots herself in two worlds, the natural and the poetic. Consider the title, the coastal hunter lurking beyond the compost pile, which smells of ripe and rot. Life and death. Passion and its opposite, her touchstones if you will, that give her voice power, after all “like fire,/when we no longer burn, we die.”
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