Review by Deborah K. Frontiera
What makes us “sane” or “insane”? That is the question poet Ellen Lord explores in her collection of poems, Relative Sanity. The opening poem, “Muse”, speaks of thoughts coming to us out of silence. Then there are memories of the poet’s childhood and her unbalanced mother, the birth of her youngest brother and her mother’s desperation and what makes us lose it or have hope. Here we read about the poet’s life in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in memoir poems.
In Part II, poems seem to move in full circles from things-are-not-what-they-seem to finding meaning and twisted surprises at the end. One of my favorites is “Guillotine Dream” with its dark thoughts and the flips and flops of life. Here
are some of those wonderful lines:
What I took to be a piece of chocolate
turned out to be a severed sow’s ear, …
What I took to be a blazing sunrise,
turned out to be the flame-glow of a wildfire …
And at the end:
A general misunderstanding of the world,
Denial of insidious malice and misperception
of dark motives, more tragic than comic,
That precipitated my decision to sever
the heads of your cherished tulips.
Later she writes of other failed romances and youthful freedom.
Some poems leave a reader with unanswered questions. Why the change from rhymed to unrhymed in the middle of “Ode to Blue”, and why equate blue with a valentine? But when we stop to ponder, we “get it” and it all makes perfect sense. Or relative sanity, if you prefer. And the line, “A color to be tangled up in”, jumps out at us.
“Eros” recalls young love and loss, while “Forest Bathing” equates a walk in the woods to relaxing in a warm bath. We read a fish’s point of view in “Being Caught”. Other poems remind a reader to look at the flip side of things—easy on the surface but look deeper and between the lines and many sorrows to bear become possible.
In short, we are all relatively sane—or maybe not.
Don’t miss this lovely collection of poems, many of which were published in numerous poetry anthologies and reviews including Dunes Review, Bear River Anthology, and Walloon Writers Review before being collected into one place for us to read. This volume will have a special place on my bookshelf so I can enjoy it over and over.
Relative Sanity: Poems
by Ellen Lord
ISBN 978-1-61599-767-1, Modern History Press 2023, Ret. $14.95
