Review of Relative Sanity, by Ellen Lord
By Lee Kisling, October 2023
In Ellen Lord’s first poetry collection Relative Sanity, the title alone suggests the dual-usage of carefully chosen words. The first poem tells in perfectly balanced prose the story of Lord’s unbalanced mother fleeting in hospital garb – 200 miles – from an asylum after being committed following a nervous breakdown. Lord ends the piece with a perfect haiku: asylum seeker / dancing barefoot and childless / in another life. I like to believe that that “in another life” is Lord’s inward glance; the last line is hers – her own life.
Three pages later, the poem “Music” subtly weaves music, muse, and amusement around in her memory so closely felt in her present moment. The memories take place under the rain falling on a tin-roofed shed, revisiting the poet Rilke, her mother, Bob Dylan and her own wildness. Lord writes, Bring on the music of storms, the tempo of wind / the luscious fermata of silence.
Ellen Lord’s book, like the best first collections, encompasses a long experience, from childhood, through career (a behavioral health therapist), marriage, and widowhood. These are poems of occasional ecstasy but also regret. Lord’s often short lines seem to show the influence of Japanese poetry in which small thoughts carry much weight. Her use of nature images is suggestive and compelling. In the poem “Fish Tales: An Elegy” Lord establishes her place among the best new (to us) and sublime lyric poets. Soaringly erotic, she describes her own seduction and implied loss (the title…An Elegy) in eleven lines.
One can sense the wildness in Ellen Lord. And one is grateful that her long introspection and emotional intelligence has created this marvelous book of honest artful poems.
Relative Sanity: Poems by Ellen Lord
What makes us “sane” or “insane”? That is the question poet Ellen Lord explores in her collection of poems, Relative Sanity. The opening poem, “Muse”, speaks of thoughts coming to us out of silence. Then there are memories of the poet’s childhood and her unbalanced mother, the birth of her youngest brother and her mother’s desperation and what makes us lose it or have hope. Here we read about the poet’s life in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in memoir poems.
In Part II, poems seem to move in full circles from things-are-not-what-they-seem to finding meaning and twisted surprises at the end. One of my favorites is “Guillotine Dream” with its dark thoughts and the flips and flops of life. Here
are some of those wonderful lines:
What I took to be a piece of chocolate
turned out to be a severed sow’s ear, …
What I took to be a blazing sunrise,
turned out to be the flame-glow of a wildfire …
And at the end:
A general misunderstanding of the world,
Denial of insidious malice and misperception
of dark motives, more tragic than comic,
That precipitated my decision to sever
the heads of your cherished tulips.
Later she writes of other failed romances and youthful freedom.
Some poems leave a reader with unanswered questions. Why the change from rhymed to unrhymed in the middle of “Ode to Blue”, and why equate blue with a valentine? But when we stop to ponder, we “get it” and it all makes perfect sense. Or relative sanity, if you prefer. And the line, “A color to be tangled up in”, jumps out at us.
“Eros” recalls young love and loss, while “Forest Bathing” equates a walk in the woods to relaxing in a warm bath. We read a fish’s point of view in “Being Caught”. Other poems remind a reader to look at the flip side of things—easy on the surface but look deeper and between the lines and many sorrows to bear become possible.
In short, we are all relatively sane—or maybe not.
Don’t miss this lovely collection of poems, many of which were published in numerous poetry anthologies and reviews including Dunes Review, Bear River Anthology, and Walloon Writers Review before being collected into one place for us to read. This volume will have a special place on my bookshelf so I can enjoy it over and over.
Relative Sanity: Poems
by Ellen Lord
ISBN 978-1-61599-767-1, Modern History Press 2023, Ret. $14.95
