(Encounters with Inscriptions, Sliced)
The poems in John J. Ronan’s new book, The Idea of Light, soar between earth and sky, body and soul, the sacred and the profane with deftness and ease. Roving through myriad subjects and sentiments ranging from the tender to the ferocious, Ronan lifts us into the cosmos while also rooting us firmly to the ground beneath our stumbling feet. Comprised of three parts, I. Halo and Clay, II. A Certain Rich Man, and III. Ether and Belief, the book explores humanity’s wanderings in spaces both minute and vast. From suburban living rooms to ancient Egypt, from a Parisian café to a veterinary clinic, the poet roves through an array of locales with intelligence, curiosity, and wit.
The title/first poem considers the moon in daylight—bland, dispassionate. “A midday moon says nothing of love: / Albedo ash, atmosphere none, / Heedless of sign or madness, amour,” Ronan writes. “Dusk summons the idea of light: / A Western crescent in ichor white,” evoking fecundity, mythos, and creativity even while the final line yanks us back to earth, for the moon appears as “The illusion of huge. Let us pray.” Other poems evoke a similar pulley-like sensation. “The Pedestal” recounts Catholicism’s fetishizing of the Virgin Mary—that “In the seminary, priests-to-be thought of girls / In Marian images mostly, real flesh / Deflected by confessors urging their celibate selves / And mentored boys to believe only in blessed / Virgins, chaste vessels of the Holy Ghost.” Imagine their surprise, then, encountering a “Mix of piety and dry martinis, lust” in a flesh-and-blood woman. “Human love,” the poet writes, is “laminate, halo and clay,” the saintly and the bodily, a combination embodied in his partner that continues to surprise the speaker decades later.
Poems in Part I explore the range of human experience along with elements of the natural world. In “The Servitude of Eavesdrop,” a couple watch their new neighbors through their living room window like silver-screen images from the silent era; “Nothing You Need” rues the gentrification transforming Main Street, USA, into shoppes hawking soaps, candles, and kale, the “bright brew pub / Featuring Pumpkin Harvest ale”; “A Lumberyard in Gloucester, Massachusetts” ponders harvested wood processed into all manner of objects—“Someone’s dream house, a new garage”—and priced accordingly. The wonderful four-part “Windowsill” meditates on objects seen beneath an office window—as quartz alchemized into a magic jewel, as an ancient pharaoh’s glory reduced to the “Knick knack status” of a small figurine.
In a similar vein, “Princess Ennigaldi” reflects on relics and museums, our penchant for preserving and exploiting the past. The speaker and his partner leave the museum wing of mummified remains, packed with schoolchildren, for a quieter section displaying “the pottery of Kish and Ur— / Where the young Ennigaldi, daughter of Nabonidus, / Assembled the world’s first museum / In 530 B.C. / With something like the urgency of a teen memoir,” a brilliant simile I read over and over, along with the surprising and poignant final line, “Whatever was the Princess thinking?”
The conceit flows into the next poem, “Leaving Thebes,” which imagines “The mummy diaspora who journeyed off / By plane or train, a stagecoach, ship, / To Europe, the East, the New World. / Like Princess Kherima . . . A nobody, really . . .” Her voyage to Brazil ends in literal flames, her body reduced to ashes in a tragic museum fire of 2018. The poem’s collapsing of time and space and critique of traditional museums brings to mind my own recent experience at the British Museum. In the Ancient Egypt wing (where else?), I stared at a crate housing the skeletal remains of a teenaged girl, and I wept for her.
The first poem of Part II features Dives, a rich man whose experience of descending into hell is told in the 16th chapter of the Gospel of Luke in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. In Ronan’s poem, Dives justifies his “misdemeanors”: his wealth, his empty gestures towards the poor and the suffering, and his stubborn refusal, still, to listen to Lazarus’s instructions to heed Moses and the Prophets to find salvation. Ronan situates the figure of Dives in other poems in Part II as observer, Everyman, or perhaps a stand-in for the poet himself.
“Confirmation Bias” evokes the section’s opening poem in critiquing our uncanny ability to conduct or find research that sanctions our worst impulses and actions, that fosters the “everyone gets a trophy for showing up” culture. In “Transgender,” an aging man finds it easier to pee sitting down, “The gender expression now appropriate” along with his exasperation with the men in his life “Whose fickle piss dries on tiles . . . / Dives’ toilette is a fixed routine: / Tinkle neatly, and with impatience, clean.” “On Rejection” wryly encapsulates the shit sandwich that is the rejection letter all writers know: praise for the writer’s style, reasons why the piece is unsuited for publication, then “a switch / To poetry’s prosaic, publishing concerns— / The next issue’s theme, a subscription pitch, / A sincere request for preferred pronouns.” Dives imagines the recent co-ed, oh so hip, churning out such letters. “He would not kick them out of bed.”
Closing Part II is the devastating “On Regrets” in which the speaker imagines those who die by suicide having regrets at the last moment, when it’s too late. “Dives believes compressed reflection / Must oftentimes include regret, / Prompted by pain, by embarrassing / Grammar lapses in the whiny note, / By not having seen as bright challenge / Life’s suddenly welcome uncertainty.” I’m haunted and inspired by this whipsaw of thoughts, the sudden and tardy revelation of the last two lines.
The poems in Part III Ether and Belief continue to engage earthly and cosmic realms, blurring the two in fascinating ways. “Quietus” features an American tourist in England going through the motions. “This endless English summer day,” the poem begins, “You cruise the Thames, ride the Eye, / Snap the changing palace guards,” zip through museums, and attend a performance of Hamlet in the evening. The figure’s mind drifts from the action on the stage, though, as he pictures the dust accumulating, the plants drying out in his empty house back home. Leaving the theater, he’s “Swept quickly along by the city and green / Lights, the crosswalks counting down” as he, we imagine, counts down the minutes until he can go home. The back-to-back “4015 Alabama” and “Mom’s Watch” reflect on the past, consciousness, and the vagaries of memory. “The Procedure” and “On Placebos” take us along with aging, ailing bodies into hospitals and recovery rooms.
The book’s final poem, “Flight Time,” resembles “On Language” from Part I in its participant-observer noting the people around him. “The rough runway lumbering ends,” the poem begins, “In uplift of this lucky machine / Into ether and belief,”—into power, precarity, and volatility all at once. Such is the condition of riding in a plane and our human condition as well. We see “Rosaried old, second honeymooners / . . . / A burka. A suit. Sweat clothes.” We see the rituals of a transatlantic flight in “A second meal and movie, scotch” / . . . Seatbelt warnings Off and On.” Overheard disconnected bits of conversation. And then, we prepare for landing, “The plane motionless in surrounding cloud. / Position lights blink on the wings.” “Flight Time” beautifully concludes The Idea of Light, its plane soaring high into the air while those inside live out the mundane realities of the everyday. Is life a miracle? Is it absurd? Is there a true light to inspire and guide us? Or is the light just an idea, a suggestion we cling to in order to survive? I appreciate the images and questions raised by Ronan’s provocative, beautiful book.