Grief and Gravity: A Review of ANCHOR by Rebecca Aronson
“A body” writes Rebecca Aronson in her new collection, Anchor, “is a just a set of nerves in fur and spangles.” Yet these nerves at the core of our simple being can turn our lives into a labyrinth of emotion. A brief, breathtaking journey through the viewpoint of an adult child who must navigate her own parents’ decline and passing, Anchor deftly sidesteps the maudlin or macabre and invites us into a new reckoning with mortality.
Death waits just beyond the next page in this collection. The imminence of mortality, almost more than mortality itself, troubles the speaker. In a series of letter poems addressed “Dear gravity,” she cajoles the broader forces in the world—specifically, those that knock her father off his literal and metaphorical balance—for understanding of why they must do what they do. Such knowledge can’t empower us but is learning for knowing; as the speaker laments, “how vexing to be made an instrument/that measures only what can’t be mastered.” The lack of control and its associated pain cut deep in these poems, even as the narrative tension keeps us reading.
Aronson captures the absurd heartbreak of dementia with particular accuracy. One day, the devastation is palpable, and, as in “Source,” the speaker laments of her mother, “she has forgotten everything/she ever wondered.” Yet as many loved ones of dementia patients know, there are also moments of levity, as in “My Mother at the Gate”: “Sometimes/kindness descends like a fever. We walk the halls/laughing at nonsense and are briefly cheerful.” We cling to what we can, and we shake off or sit with what we wish to forget.
At once expansive and microcosmic, Anchor scrutinizes all levels of deterioration and forces at work in our world. Environmental degradation stands on its own and as a metaphor for the smaller crumblings that feel astronomical to individuals but are insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Contemplating the smoking, burning land around her in “Fire Country,” Aronson writes “the air is thick/with other people’s fires. And my own burning/is so small as to go unnoticed.” Amid all the damage that our “toddler species” does to ourselves and our planet, the individual struggles seem trivial.
Yet Aronson’s poems continually validate the significance of griefs, “those awkward pointed stars/there is no easy way to hold,” no matter how small they seem in the cosmic scheme of things. We’re reminded that even seemingly evanescent things have its importance and impact, even “the petal of your life which is brief, which is delicate and weightier than you know,” as is the chrysanthemum that gives the poem its name.
Even as its focus involves death, the cyclic nature of life crops up periodically in the collection as Aronson reminds us that those we are losing once stood in our shoes. Parenthood comes into a new focus when seen from the middle position of both being and raising a child: the “endless falling and fear of failing” that we don’t understand until we enter.
The range of responses to grief, including the struggle against the inevitable, give the collection depth and authenticity. There’s angst, resistance to the prospect of loss, anxiety, magical thinking, and eventually, a tentative consideration of the future without. “Maybe there will be hauntings,” the speaker muses in “Manifestation,” or “breaths/in the still air at significant moments, tea leaves/I will ask for advice.” We don’t get a neat resolution, a fully processed grief—instead, we stand with the speaker and look forward to a future that will come, even when we can hardly think about what it could be.
Little goes unexamined in Anchor, though “Ode” hints at a strain of deliberate identity shift, duplicity even, that piques readers’ curiosity in its difference from the other themes woven through the collection. A few other poems touch on the speaker’s own complex identity—namely “The Dress I Loved” and “Is That All There Is?”—but we’re left wanting just a bit on this front.
Like many of the best poetry collections, Anchor does not give its readers an easy ride, but the resulting catharsis, coupled with the lyricism of Rebecca Aronson’s verse, make this book a deeply moving and worthwhile read.
