In A Landscape Of Having To Repeat

By Martha Ronk

Reviewed by Jenny Drai

            “The underlying cause is as absent as rain,” Martha Ronk writes in “In a Landscape of Having to Repeat,” the first poem in her latest collection of the same title from Omnidawn.  The poet follows this line (the third in the poem) with, “Yet one remembers rain even in its absence and an attendant quiet.”  These lines, which form a reminder of sorts, can themselves describe the pleasurable experience of reading a book in which appearances can function as a slide without roots into the everyday even as Ronk redefines and revisions the quotidian.  “Skin pulled tight isn’t the usual thing but what / carries us beyond sleep and the falling out of my eyes,” writes Ronk in “A Memory That Isn’t Yours” thus demonstrating Freud’s definition of the unheimlich.  (Ronk will quote Freud in a sequence of prose poems to remind us that, “we find things uncanny when they are familiar yet also somehow foreign.”)  Throughout this beautiful and moving collection, the poet puts what might be termed ‘ordinary’ language to use (i.e. “skin,” “tight,” “usual”) to create juxtapositions, combinations, and even unique grammatical conjoining (“. . .I said what’s kept / is a kind of where I was yesterday for example”) to offer the gratifying experience of always sliding one’s mind around a piece of language without ever ‘succeeding,’ thus challenging any easy ideas the reader may have about recognition or comprehension of language and grammar as purely intellectual constructs.

            Throughout the collection the poet also toys with the reader’s familiarity with the sentence, a basic grammatical mode of existence almost every school child learns to embrace as subject, predicate, etc.  It’s not that Ronk’s sentences aren’t composed of nouns, verbs, and objects, but it’s how they accumulate them.  “Closer to My Natural Voice” and “The Glass Portrait” (the former directly proceeds the latter) both consist of single, run-on, multi-lined sentences.  Whereas “Closer to My Natural Voice” relies only on a single period at the end as punctuation and thus allows the reader to rush through the language (“although it seems otherwise than it might / but closer to my natural voice as you say isn’t / a crucial event but the actual words which I’ve kept to myself”) in what might be seen as an attempt (however futile) to arrive at a nearness, the commas dotting the shorter lines of “The Glass Portrait” (“maybe she says you / aren’t like that, the purposeful / placement you lie through it / the three fragile ones / lined up, that’s all.”) serve to physically lift and stop language away from whatever false center or sense of approximation the act of portraiture might entail.

            Ronk directly (or perhaps more appropriately, indirectly) addresses Freud’s definition of the uncanny in a numbered series of prose poems, “In the Vicinity.”  The poems use shifting repetitions (“screen,” “frame,” “stroke,” “live,” “home”) in various connotations to describe what can be seen as a permanent state of constant flux.  The poems quietly examine, individually and as a sequence, what it might mean to inhabit a location while at the same time challenging this possibility through explications of the uncanny.  “On the Road,” for example, collects itself ostensibly around a running-out-of-gas incident, discussions of the novel, and a more general incident of lost-ness.  (“I, however, have only lost my bearings.  I am lost again in the nearby vicinity of my very own home.”)  Home bears for the speaker the idea not just of physical home (although Ronk plays with this idea in the series as well) but also a home base where one’s “bearings” might be stored (“For my own part I am glad for the novel because one has to live somewhere other than on the freeway”).  We, as readers, might expect this sort of home to be present wherever the speaker is located, but instead are afforded with a sense of location existing wherever the speaker isn’t precisely there.  Location is always slightly ajar in the framework of Ronk’s elegant poetic universe. 

            While In a Landscape of Having to Repeat contains longer sequences (the prose poem series and a collection of short pieces entitled “Quotidian” that originally appeared as an a+bend chapbook) and shorter individual poems, each piece of Ronk’s writing works individually as an examination of ordinary language in series of out-of-ordinary placements and as an accumulation of language holding us ‘in the vicinity’ which, this collection seems to argue successfully, is where we always are.  “Disintegration (Bio/Auto): for Eva Hesse,” is Ronk’s examination of the work and life of Eva Hesse (1936-1970), the German-born American artist who used impermanent materials like fiberglass, rubber latex, and cheesecloth in her sculpture and who died tragically young after being diagnosed with a brain tumor, and is as good a place as any to end discussion of a collection focused on the observation of and fascination with the quotidian.  Ronk collides effortlessly in a single line the malleable conditions of life, art, and the collection as a whole: “Her condition continued to deteriorate despite knowing how to proceed.”