(Guernica Editions, 2024, 121 pages)
…
observe the body
as it worms between leaves, squeezes into folio, witness to textured
weave, to signatures bound in faux leather, in paperback, translations
between rows of beans, pods of verbal clauses dangling from stems
while fields lie fallow, forests burn perforated pages where words,
who paragraphs steak justified in columns, sliced cubes of letters
under crumble of Pink Pearl erasers as the system of nature,
like absented rivers, flows unmarked in the margins
(“systema,” 11)
In a Tension of Leaves and Binding is Renée M. Sgroi’s second poetry collection. With its varied forms (traditional and experimental) and play of voices (the poet’s and those of plants and animals) we enter a world both multilayered and accessible. Beautifully conceived and delivered, In a Tension of Leaves and Binding delights and intrigues.
Grounded in the garden, the poems are dirt under the fingernails, both real and metaphor. Reading In a Tension… we learn about the inhabitants of, and visitors to, the garden. We sense grief. And we learn about the gardener – her intense stare, touch, involvement – her leap into “other.”
To distinguish the voices of poet from “other,” Sgroi shifts margins. The poems on the left margin are in the poet’s voice. Others, she tells us are “centred in the middle of the page, a sign that the imagined voice of the onion, the carrot, the grasshopper is bounded by the margins of what is knowable and what is not” (“In other words, two,” 113).
She also plays with form in other ways. For example, the words in “Morphology” box a rectangle, a garden. Words in the seven “visitations” poems are scattered across the pages like birds visiting a feeder. Sgroi experiments with form in still other ways. In “MIXED METHODS EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF ACER SACCHARUM IN SITU, WITH PROGNOSIS BY ARBORISTS AND LINGUISTS ON THE FUTURE OF INTERSPECIES COMMUNICATION: AN INVESTIGATION” (45-49) Sgroi’s form mimics a research paper under the headings of abstract through conclusions.
Some poems reveal, some stir questions like riddles in a caldron. Some poems, like the titular poem connect us – mothers and daughters – to trees and leaves:
…
sweetness is the sound a pen makes
or a spine’s crack when first opened
as a birth canal binds daughter, mother
into a book of doubled pages
and into the sweep a willow branch extends
low beside the river,
and snaps
in a tension of leaves and binding,”
… (50).
Please read the remainder of the review in The Temz Review.
Kathryn MacDonald 