Ballast

What’s beneath a poem? Beneath form and metaphor, image and syntax? These questions emerge when reading Ballast, the latest collection by current Portland Poet Laureate Linda Aldrich. For her, part of the answer is: people and their stories. Stories of the poet in various stages of life. Stories of ship captains and accused heretics, of mothers and aunts, unsung women engaged in daily heroics. College students, Vietnam vets, actors. And Amelia Earhart:

I think of you often Amelia Earhart,
never earthbound,
freer
than other women, you went farther, feathering
our imagination with your rare
and fearless heart.

These are poems of people doing and thinking all manner of things, working the fiber of life the best they know how. Some soar like Earhart. Others want to, like the girl at the center of Wherewithal:

[. . .] That summer the girl cut off her braids
with garden shears and felt light and free because of it,
snuck out to ride her bike at night to feed her dreams on
moonlit wind,
riding so fierce and fast, she came to know the heat
her barefoot self could make regardless of the family still
asleep to who she was.

Ballast is filled with bravery, individuals searching for and finding affirmation outside of the expectations of family and community. To read these poems is to watch people change, come to know themselves, and learn to move with grace and agility both within and beyond their surroundings.

That grace and agility extends to Aldrich’s range as a poet, shifting comfortably between forms with precision. Ballast features free verse, sonnet, villanelle, ekphrasis, prose, and more. The poem “Notes from the Library Lecture” even offers just that, notes, with a playful transparency that thrills as it reveals both process and product:

48 warblers weigh the one pound of coffee we drink a week to
wake up
we wake up do we wake up
our earth is the tiniest blue eye sleepless and unblinking

The poems in Ballast move so artfully from form to form that the book as a whole calls to mind a dance step diagram: a wide spread of silhouetted footprints strung together with arrows and numbered directions that is anything but scattershot, an intricate arrangement of slides and pivots through which Aldrich deftly guides the reader. We become fascinated with the accomplishment of these poems, both in subject and formal range.

Maybe the most striking example of this is the presentation of a single poem divided in seven pieces to introduce each of the book’s seven sections. The poem, “Seven Scenes from a Single Life, 1985,” follows the speaker through layers of uncertainty, and the sections are immediately followed on a subsequent page by a duplicate, with one important change: each duplicate is a ghost, reprinted in a pale shade of gray with only specific words or phrases in black. The effect is immediate and gripping. The page between the two becomes a veil the reader can lift, pulling back the scrim to see a new version of the poem underneath. From there the mind reels, contemplating all the thin places between this world and the other, between twilight and dusk, between knowing and unknowing. The landscape is unchanged, but our view of it is different, layered, our perspective shifted. What Aldrich does with this single technique unifies all of the poems in Ballast, and it pleasantly haunts us long after we’ve finished reading. It’s simple. It’s deep. It’s just so cool. As a reader, it’s near impossible to read a book and not consider its title. Here, that consideration brings back the question we began with: what’s beneath a poem? For Aldrich, what’s beneath a poem is a grounding force, the same as what’s beneath the deck of a sturdy ship: ballast. Also, more poems. Always more poems.

— Mike Bove