Ronna Bloom, In a Riptide

 

Immeasurable

Today a woman of no measurable age stopped me
to ask where she could buy some meat, and her eyes
filled up with tears when it seemed too far or impossible
and every shop was closed. I could do nothing but stand there,
vibrating in the hesitant spring. We were just to mere
meandering women in the empty street. Some of us
looking down as though illness could pass through the eyes,
others looking up, sending out our million help-me messages.
We stood there with nothing obvious passing between us
but time. Then she smiled and went away.
And I thought of the four people the Buddha met in his travels:
sick person, old person, dead person, happy person with nothing.
And I felt like all of them.

I was curious to go through Toronto poet and educator Ronna Bloom’s latest, In a Riptide (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2025), aware that she’s had a stack of published collections since I first discovered her work through her debut, Fear of the Ride (Ottawa ON: Carleton University Press, 1996) and follow-up, Personal Effects (Toronto ON: Pedlar Press, 2000). She’s published a few more titles since those days, including the recent A Possible Trust: The Poetry of Ronna Bloom, selected with an introduction by Phil Hall (Waterloo ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2023). “I’m not just feeling,” the poem “Don’t Be Superficial, ‘Cause We’ll Soon Find Out” in this new collection offers, “I’m seeing. / And I’m here, committed to breathing, / joy, and painting, until there’s nothing left.”

Set in four sections of poems—“To Show the Scars: sick person,” “For Ten Billion Years: old person,” “The Earth Held Me: dead person” and “Don’t Close the Door to the Door to the Door: happy person with nothing”—as well as an opening poem, “Immeasurable,” In a Riptide is a book about looking, pausing, appreciating and seeing; a book on attending, on being attentive. “What do I look forward to?” she asks, as part of “October in my 62^nd Year,” “Metamucil in my gin and tonic, / a boiled egg in the morning, and a trail / of Werther’s candies in a lap around the park.” Composed as an assemblage of first-person narratives, Bloom’s sketchworks write on illness and age and all that comes with it, but resist lyric closure or expectation. “I turn to look at myself / and wait for one of us to speak.” she writes, to close the short poem “Area 3.” Or, two pages prior, as she closes the first of two parts of the poem “Vulnerable to,” writing: “I resist poetic redemption. Let it be this.”

There is something of the document, of a kind of meditative reportage, to Bloom’s lyrics, utilizing the space of the lyric to recollect, collect or leave one’s mark. “I need to write closer to the truth,” she writes, as part of the extended poem “The Party,” “not the wished-for truth. / To be roughed up a bit. Stop protecting myself from the end. / It’s an end not an ending.” Mortality is there, but it was always there, and this is Bloom, writing from within a particular moment, a particular period of time and of life, without urgency, but attempting a clarity and a comprehension, so that she might be able to move forward. “Please tell us, they said, if you will leave the light on,” she writes, as part of “Is It Safe?,” “if you’ll come back, / what you did here and with whom, / and will we be lovely, will we be lonely, / will we be lucky?”