Reviewed by Carol Barrett
The Goodbye Kit by Daneen Bergland
Airlie Press, 2024, 64 pages, $18.00
ISBN 978-1-950404-15-5
Available at www.airliepress.org
Daneen Bergland’s first book of poetry is a beautiful assembly of evocative poems, almost all of which have appeared individually in literary magazines. The first thing that greets the reader is gorgeous cover art by Sarah Jarrett. A woman’s outstretched arms reach for nature’s blessings as butterflies touch her skin and clouds carry us into the text. Visual images from this art are repeated in the opening to each of the book’s sections, inviting us anew to become immersed in nature and in the life cycle that unfolds.
The poems often take up the developmental tasks of young adulthood, balancing exploration and autonomy, intimacy and solitude. The sweep of nature enfolds these poems, a constant reminder of both beauty and the ephemeral. Richly memorable poems celebrate the gifts of marriage and the raising of a child.
The imagery in Bergland’s poetry is frankly phenomenal. I found myself underlining phrase after phrase, captivated by the unusual pairings she has created to heighten the emotional tenacity of the speaker. In the opening poem, “Animals Invaluable to Epidemiologists for Tracking the Spread of Disease Will Appear to Us as Angels,” we find Music has always been good for sad things. Just ask the birds. In “The Ecology of Marriage,” we are told, Love is the stubborn knot at the joint of a tree / the river licks and licks. In “Pleasure,” the poet describes a violinist, his candy box / humming against his neck. And a bit later: I miss a little saddle for my head / to ride the back of a song.
In several poems, Bergland invokes the figure of Eve to dramatize the essential feminine. We are given “Eve Wakes Up After the Fall and Picks Up Her Phone,” “Eve in Old Age,” and “Sometimes Eve Gets Drunk Enough to Forgive Herself.” There is also a series of poems commenting on the nature of love with startling connections: “Love Scene with Maggots,” “Love Scene with Organs,” and “Love Scene with Plankton.”
What children teach us is a theme that also tousles its curls in some of these poems. Here is the ending to “The Prodigal Vandals,” which takes up the act of playing with a young child:
I pucker my lips
and she smashes her face
into mine like a movie-screen lover.
She screeches until she is hoarse,
forces laughter from her throat
like she’s shoving a body
over the side of a boat.
As Bergland’s notes to these poems make clear, she is no stranger to botany or zoology. The claims of these poems are set in vivid creaturely facts, undermining any resistance we might wish to pummel onto the page. In the final poem, from which the book title derives, “The Goodbye Kit,” Bergland is not just playing nice with a shift in temporality: a relationship that has moved on to a new arrangement, a periodic but recoverable loss when the kids go off to camp, or one’s partner flies off on a routine business trip. No, she is grappling with death itself, emphatic, irreversible, and final. She begins:
Don’t forget the heirloom tomatoes.
Don’t forget the tragic book of matches.
Truth is, I’d rather like to be ancestral.
Dying is just par for the course.
This haunting poem ends with the following lines:
…it’s time
we were affecting sad accents and packing
our capsules. Time to cover the mirrors.
Time to tuck in your feathers. Time to relinquish
all your plastics and let the sea fill.
Nothing’s calmer than a husk,
its soft brush with breath.
Thus the poet has walked us through some of the treasures of this life, startled us with novel insights about our connections to other beings, and left us, finally, with a strong warning. In “Tractor Music,” Bergland claims God’s got a grief so big it makes its own shade. Ultimately, this book challenges us to become part of the light, daring to tamper with God’s burden.
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