Body Turn to Rain. New and Selected Poems by Richard Robbins (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Body Turn to Rain. New and Selected Poems by Richard Robbins Jeffery Moser Richard Robbins. Body Turn to Rain. New and Selected Poems. Spokane: Lynx House Press, 2017. 203p. Writing does not get easier with age or success, although the second is almost always more rewarding than the first. The more we write and publish, the better writers and mentors we become, and the more comfortable we are with entertaining and expressing ourselves with words and works that make others think. Seasoned writers deepen their skills in probing and sharing the kinds of engaging fiction and poetry underpinned by serious intent that remind readers that literature is worthwhile for civil society, and especially wholesome for aged souls. This is the sense that one gains from the dual thrusts of Richard Robbins and his poems. Body Turn to Rain offers several new poems–40 altogether–along with work from five prior collections. A transplant from Southern California and Montana, where he grew up, to southcentral Minnesota in the mid-1980s, Robbins has successfully managed to serve and succeed as both a dedicated teacher of creative writing (at Minnesota State, Mankato) and a prolific and persistent published poet. It is no wonder that his poetry reveals both an adherence to poetic meter and form as well as the departure from poetic technique and form into multiple variations of verse. For example, the creative lyricism and foundational rhythms that must be observed and practiced by all budding poets in undergraduate and graduate creative writing programs can be found girded [End Page 81] in "Moon in Smoke, Teton Park" (2000): "We waited until you carved / the yellow darkness out, moved / land away like one still loved / but a burden – pulling up" (110). However, more advanced, critical and consequential poetic meaning and form pours out in the new poems such as "Pacific Coast," where: "The woman became water again when the car and the house and the dog roaming in the yard all turned to her at the same time in order to grow larger than themselves" (37). Again, in the poem, "Violence," when "she said love, she meant the reservoir emptying, the rush of water down the canyon, the eucalypti, cars, and broken households of the rich jostling toward the basin. In the one-story homes, lower-down, human beings could only dream of the love coming their way, driving them and animals to rooftops" (36). Further examples of mastery at infusing critical thinking with dramatic storytelling abound. The opening poem, "Turpentine," startles with: "the leg as it broke, quiet knuckle, / or the melon-thump that day a speeding / biker died into the curb" (1). Similarly, in the intimate conversation between the poet and a character named Pablo in "The End of a Long Winter North in the Northern Hemisphere": "Still, I need you to explain the bagpipes / coming this way through the woods, and the kilts / flying up regularly, and the perfume / of sex now steadily on the wind" (29). "A Map of the World" (51) is the last in the series of new poems, followed by a selection of 90 poems from five prior collections printed in 1984, 2000, 2008, 2009, and 2010. Fittingly, the anthology ends with a long poem titled, "Rain" (193-200), and thus is literally a "body turn to rain." On the cover, William Trowbridge rightfully acknowledges that these poems are "grounded in the geography of the American West – its seasons, its people, its destruction – and lifted by the music Robbins coaxes out of language. They reveal a sympathy with nature and a passion for humane awareness in a culture which often seems to tell us merely to consume and, 'Be happy you know nothing'." Yet the poet achieves more than commenting on the material, social, and ethical. His poems make individual statements about the worth and legacy of a writer and their relationship to others and their observations of the natural world that poetry makes possible and sustains in print. Body Turn to Rain is a compilation about the "human" and in real time. What flows from Robbins' thoughtful mind and well-hewed [End Page 82] wrists are the works of an experienced teacher-poet...