In the
thirteen poems within Nicole Rollender's Absence of Stars chapbook, "A hummingbird’s skeleton opens my hands / like a flower". The content of this collection is filled with
flowers and bones, flight towards the light and falling down onto the ground,
tiny and helpless. The
beginning of the collection is inspired by the early birth of a tiny baby, a
living life form that could have died but emerged from the womb too soon, a new
life that starts out with skin attached to almost death-like bones. The bones
of the tiny living baby connect to memories of the past and the bones of the
dead, and perhaps a wondering of what
this child's bones will grow into, how life and death will handle that new
body.
From the first poem in the chapbook,
"Necessary
Work"
Roman
poets put skulls in their love poems – the mortal
with the immortal, the dark in
the brilliant death-light; the plum falling
from
its long branch, then sweetly decomposing. The excruciating
parting of our two bodies,
that was necessary. Your tiny body – you can’t
even
drink my milk – sleeps in my palm. Holding you, my hand is a cradle
of
bone...
The
bones inside meat connect to the carnage of wild life and what lies beneath or
beyond or above - the possibility of the next life, of heaven. The throwing of salt
and flinging of apples and tossing of flowers. The licking of salt and other small
rituals involving bread and milk and bread and bones and bread and more flowers.
From the poem, "Alms for Birds"
...Hidden once, I watched
my father kick a dog against a
fence,
as I ate honeysuckle
seasick, forming the place where my
child
is a wetted bird broken out too
soon...
The
interconnections of sinners and saints, parent and child, human and non-human,
and haunted souls of the living and the dead, "Does the flock / that
leaves one drowned in the river ever forget its black wings and shimmering eye?".
Wings, twigs, living and dead birds, living and dead
animals, skulls, broken teeth, broken necks.
From the poem, "Lullaby"
When he fell, Mama
was twisting a duck’s neck out back,
a mercy
he landed skull first.
Her hands tracing bones, cranium
bottom-pierced
to let the spirit
flash out from the body...
The
living and the dead surround each other throughout the Absence of
Stars as does the darkness and the light. There are parts of both in this
collection and I prefer the darker edged elements, the uneasy emotions, the
twinges of viscera and snapped necks more than the delicate land-based,
plant-based aspects. Appealingly to me, the dark and light parts are often
uniquely intertwined within mere lines of each other. A good example of such
entwinement takes place within the beginning of the title poem.
From the poem "Absence of Stars"
This is the
oldest part of the cemetery, then, this snow dripping in bone yards,
bones, bones
–
delicate milk teeth, scooped
from a mother’s grave by a woman, peeling apples,
calm,
the morning
light and somewhere a heart is cleaving,
snow
unspooling
air...
On a
personal level, regarding my reaction to much of Nicole Rollender's poetry that
I've read, it is interesting to me how Rollender openly identifies herself as Catholic
and offers a lot of God-like and biblical elements in her poems (within this Absence of Stars chapbook - and also within her Bone of My
Bone chapbook, which was recently published by my own Blood Pudding Press
- and also within poems of hers I've read in different literary magazines) and
that I am drawn to and relate to parts of the poems. I am someone who was raised Catholic -
reached a point of feeling as if it was being forced upon me and as if I was
not allowed to make my own choices - reached a point of feeling/acting
anti-Catholic - had years of considering myself an Atheist and now consider
myself Agnostic with my own sort of spiritual flow, who is open to others
spiritual flows, as long as they're not forced upon me in some sort of black
and white, right and wrong capacity. I've found myself wondering what it is
about some of Rollender's poetry that appeals to me so strongly - and I think a
large part of it is because, not only is her writing style unique and emotional
and visceral, there is also nothing black and white or right and wrong about
her content. It is mentally connected and haunted in both light and dark ways. It is questioning (of the past, present, and
future), female body-based (including discomfort associated with parts of the
living body combined with joy for parts of what the body can do combined with
pain and what the body can handle and how it can unexpectedly malfunction), and
drawn to another dimension in a haunted sort of way.
Some of
her poems' visceral aspects remind me of my young overly sensitive Catholic
mind being strongly drawn to the torture of female saints, being terribly
fearful of hell, and feeling as if I was not good enough for heaven, not
because of how I behaved, but because of the creepy, gruesome images that lived
inside my mind. Frequently questioning and confessing, whether or not I was in
a confessional booth. Confessing to myself inside my own head, sometimes
confessing to others even though they didn't ask me to, still sometimes confessing
inside my own poems. Maybe my poems are some sort of abstract, anti-repression,
Agnostic confessional booth.
I relate
to Nicole Rollender's mind for being openly expressive, for not attempting to
hide the uncertainty and questions, the unsettling dark parts of life, or how
life can suddenly end, or how life can maybe begin again in a ghostly haunted
heavenly way. Rollender coalesces the
light and the dark and thus instigates thoughts and feelings about life and
death and their intermingling.
From the poem, "Breviary Notes"
dreams of my mother devouring the
light.
Overflowing bowl of collarbones.
I run on stripped feet in a river
forever tearing rocks.
One of my ribs wrapped
in feathers. Where my soul is a
place, the flare
of paradise, snow...
***
Nicole Rollender is
editor of Stitches. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming
in The Adroit Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, Best
New Poets, The Journal, Radar Poetry, Salt
Hill Journal, THRUSH Poetry Journal, West Branch, Word
Riot and others. Her first full-length poetry collection, Louder
Than Everything You Love, is forthcoming from ELJ Publications. She is the
author of the chapbooks Arrangement of Desire (Pudding House
Publications), Bone of My Bone, a winner in Blood Pudding Press’s
2015 Chapbook Contest, and Ghost
Tongue (Porkbelly Press,
2016). She’s the recipient of poetry prizes from CALYX Journal, Ruminate
Magazine and Princemere Journal. Find her online at nicolerollender.com.
Juliet Cook is a grotesque glitter witch medusa hybrid brimming with black,
grey, silver, purple, and red explosions. Her poetry has appeared in a peculiar
multitude of literary publications. She is also the editor and publisher of
Blood Pudding Press (which publishes print poetry chapbooks) and Thirteen Myna
Birds (Blood Pudding Press's spooky little sister, an online blog style lit
mag). You can find out more at www.JulietCook.weebly.com.
