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Review by Heather K. Hummel
Shedding Our Skins
By Ronda Broatch
Finishing Line Press, Georgetown, KY, 2008, paper, 26 pp., $14.
Poet Marvin Bell says, “I wanted to see the self, so I looked at the mulberry.” In many ways, this is exactly what Ronda Broatch explores in her new chapbook, Shedding Our Skins.
In these poems, she sees reflections of herself in moon shells, bears, and spiders. Her work follows in the footsteps of writers like Mary Oliver, as she merges with the natural world around her. To be sure, the voice in these poems echoes Oliver’s awe and enthusiasm. Broatch, however, has a more humorous tone, that proves oddly, wonderfully irreverent and reverent at the same time.
The collection’s opening poem, “Woman Emerges From Mud,” sets the theme of imaginative visioning as “other” to better understand human/nature. In this opening poem, the persona is simultaneously excavating a fossil and envisioning the predicament of being a woman becoming a fossil. The poem instructs the reader:
Imagine yourself
caught in an instant—
picking berries, tracking antelope...
Then poem continues, urging:
Imagine opening your dormant life,
layers flaking away.
You, rescued by a knife
slicing into stone, your first gasp
the brightness of night.
This poem starts the collection with a call to imagine, excavate, and awaken. Critic Gloria Feman Orenstein claims, “What is most important for us to understand is that ecofeminist artists are, indeed, taking journeys, visualizing many possibilities, presenting us with alternative visions, and gleaning knowledge that can only be obtained via the imagination.” The collection is a guided meditation through such possibilities.
Occasionally, a poem does not seem to cohere with the metaconversation of the work as a whole. At these moments, I wondered what the collection would look like were it book length; what complexities might be teased out and realized more fully? There is a sexiness, for instance, that is flirted with but left alone. And to use her metaphor of the excavation, there is a layered stratum of social revolution (of housewives, medicine women, and Eve) that I’d be curious to unearth. As a first chapbook, it shows promise of more good work to come.
Return to Volume 3.4
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