TWO
After a fifty-year contest with language itself, Kathryn Rantala happened on two controlling metaphors for what she needs to say now about her place and condition. The result is TWO, the partnering of two smaller collections: Quarried Light and The Pauper Statues. Putting aside the compacted and stressed Imagism of her previous work, she speaks through characters, most of them women, some of them wooden, who inhabit cloistered worlds of meditation, suffering and charity. Told in the first-person, in mostly brief poems, she shows us saints and martyrs and carved Finnish alms-takers--and the people who interact with them--caught in their individual tragic arcs, floundering and foundering, lost and waiting to be found.
Excerpt
Blind Lucia
It is snowing where I am
cold is shaking crystals
onto skins and furs
and it is night
it always is
constant as these flakes
and as the world that
though I stand on it
moves away
or it is raining
wet accumulating on the gorse
until its weight
pulls it to the ground
unexamined in the dark
where it is freed to be
as soon as me
nothing