JOSEPH P. TOMAIN Reviews
The Palace of Flowers by Gerry Grubbs
(Dos Madres, Loveland, OH, 2016)
“I no longer live in this or any other . . . world, I
need some flowers.”
--Mary Ruefle, My Private Property
(2016)
One might be forgiven picking up Gerry Grubbs new
book of poetry, The Palace of Flowers,
and then thinking of Baudelaire. Instead
of fleurs du mal, though, Grubbs
delivers fleurs de la romance. It is
not too much to say that he delivers fifty-seven shades of romance from anticipation
and infatuation to longing and heartbreak and to memory and desire. And, while
reading the book, one longs to meet the dedicatee Mary.
Baudelaire and Grubbs both open their collections
with an address to their readers.
Baudelaire’s opening is more of a warning and his view of the human
condition brooks no romance. He sees his readers as stupid, sinful, and
possessed by lust and hopeless boredom. It is a dark world full of obsessions,
fetid smells, Nietzschean darkness, and Death.
Grubbs invites his readers to come to the Palace and
enjoy the fragrance of his love. Instead of the dark world inhabited by death,
Grubbs’ world is ethereal and it is a place where girls forever pick flowers
for their hair. “And no one can remember/A time when this was not so.” (From No One Remembers.)
Memory, as much as flowers, serves as a motif for
these poems. In No One Knows, Grubbs
writes:
I couldn’t
remember
What had
been promised
But had
expected it to be
Something I
would enjoy
There is something eternal,
primordial even, in these lines. Is it possible that memory of romance and of
love predate existence? Are these emotions forever within us? Does memory leave
its trace even when we cannot recall it?
Just as memory links us to our
larger selves, our selves of yearning, desire, surprise, and joy, flowers link
us to the larger world of mountains and oceans and rivers. And that natural,
physical world connects back to our emotions because the natural world gives us
That sense that
Something real
Never ends
* * * *
And that’s
something
Inside you
Longed to join
(From
Mountains and Oceans)
At
the heart of this entanglement between nature and self, between memory and
existence, lies mystery as Grubbs writes in Bloom.
It is difficult to find
the root
Of the
vine that has grown into our lives
Its
entanglement with all the others
Keeps
it from being readily traced
Back to
its beginning
But
with patience with the willingness
To look
under each leaf
To
slowly extract it
We can
find just the place it was planted
(From Night After Night)
The
mystery of it all, of the romance and of the love, is both intensified and
frustrated by the difficulty of its expression.
I didn’t want
to say
What the evening was like
As if the smallest description
Would weaken it
Words may be poor vehicles to describe the
ineffable but what else do we have if we are to communicate our love, our
emotions, our wonder of the natural world and of the world within. Herein lies
the function and purpose of poetry. And,
with poetry, It Begins:
It begins as a spark
Like a
flower or a fallen star
You
find while walking
Through
your own field
Alone
in the vast night
Enthralled
with its fragrance
You
vowed to carry it everywhere
To see
everything in that
New
light
With
this idea of attempting to capture the ineffable and wanting to hold it
forever, Grubbs’ poems explore the many faces of romance whether in a first
kiss or a night of lovemaking or in new sense of the found familiar:
It has taken me thirty years
To see the beauty in the plate
And in the fork
That she sets on the table
(From
What I Wanted)
The
poetics of The Palace of Flowers
varies. Some poems have multiple stanzas with a number of different lines, some
poems have no stanzas at all. Above all, many of the poems sound in haiku.
Consider Words where he writes that
“Words are thoughts/Clothed and sound/Thinking become visible.”
Consider also A Path: “Do not think
that the footsteps/You hear means the road/You are seeking is near.”
It is quite appropriate, then, that Grubbs uses the sounds of haiku to explain
love, flowers, romance, and one’s
experience of them.
The
fifty-seven poems in this collection open a wondrous world in which flowers
bridge nature and the human through their many fragrances. And at the end of the book, instead of
staring into Baudelaire’s abyss, we are invited to join Grubbs on a different,
a romantic journey:
And so
I found
A new way
To love
Accept
Everything
Ev
Er
Y
Thing
*****
Joseph P. Tomain is Dean
Emeritus and the Wilbert and Helen Ziegler Professor of Law. His teaching
interests include law and humanities. His book Creon’s Ghost: Law, Justice and the Humanities
(2009 Oxford University Press) examines the relationship between law and
justice by looking at classic texts such as Sophocles’ Antigone. He has also written critical essays on poetry and poets
and has penned the occasional poetry review.
