Risking It by Sylvia Pollack
Red Mountain Press, April 2021
SPD / B&N / Amazon
68 pages – poetry
Readers are in for a reflective spin in Sylvia Byrne Pollack’s debut poetry collection, Risking It. She tempers her poems about serious topics with wry wit and self-depreciating humor. Pollack offers poems about hearing loss, aging, mental health, and a well-seasoned love.
Braided themes create an emotional arc without dividing the book into sections. Beginning with a sense of dread about disability and aging, by midway through the book the poems move toward acceptance and resilience. Pollack deftly uses extended metaphors to reflect on difficult subjects while adding a deeper layer of poetic imagery.
Pollack distills options and choices to basic essence. For example, the first and title poem, “Risking It,” considers trust as the speaker gamely asks whether to “make a risotto”:
If it’s confidently proclaimed,
a name for this large orange
mushroom glistening in the rain
beside a Galiano island trail
does that make it safe to eat?
With the second poem in the collection, “How the Deaf Woman Hears,” we read of a severe hearing loss and how it impacts the persona’s life. There’s acknowledgement without being maudlin as we read “Conversation is improv,” “exhausting,” “depression,” and “overcooked spaghetti.” Although Pollack herself deals with a significant hearing loss, by introducing an alter ego, she avoids straying into ultra-personal poetics.
These deaf woman poems call to mind signature poems of the recently deceased poet Marvin Bell. Like Bell’s dead man poems, Pollack’s deaf woman poems are packed with detail, tongue-in-cheek humor, and wise commentary. Both poets exaggerate and play with metaphorical deafness or deadness respectively as they continue to defy both.
Pollack lightens the dread coursing through the book via humor and a light touch. In “Deaf-ish” for example, the speaker explains she’s “not legally deaf,” but that she “fills in missing notes from memory” when listening to music. In “Girls Gone Wild,” a poem about breast cancer, the speaker calls the scar tissue “more bonded / than the sorority sisters that hung out there before.” Levity does not dismiss pain but adds another emotional layer.
Although Pollack usually writes in free verse, she gives the reader an aubade, a villanelle and a ghazal in this collection. She includes imagery of birds, mushrooms, and trees, while offering poems about poetry and art. Scientific details enter comfortably into the poems as befitting someone with Pollack’s background in zoology, biology, and cancer research.
In other poems about an alter ego named Letitia, we read of distractions and the need to focus. In “Letitia’s Lost Balloon,” the speaker reports how “jagged edges of thought slice / the narrow cord of her attention.” In “Did You Fail Lithium or Did it Fail You?” Pollack demonstrates her ability to have fun with language while at the same time displaying an understanding of mental health issues: “Beleaguered synapses / borrow transmitters, send frantic SOS // signals. No one’s receiving.” Pollack offers “socket wrenches,” “marbles,” the “inevitable ditch,” “toads,” and a “sump pump.” Then she finishes the poem “empty-handed.” Tongue-in-cheek, yes. But reading the poem again reveals and invites compassion. This poet has a knack for using metaphor and simile to both lighten and elucidate meaning.
Pollack celebrates love via sensual nature images. Several poems suggest and honor mature lesbian love. The poem “Kiss” speaks of “Trellised tomatoes” offered to “each other’s lips.” We sense appreciation for a spouse both because of and despite the daily quotidian in “Anniversary Song:”
Listen, Love,
what I might have said
is in the pants press
I gave to Goodwill.
What I should have said
was festooned with blossoms
garlands of fuchsia crepe-
paper petals.
Listen, Love,
what I will say is
I’m heating the leftovers.
Supper will be
on the table at six.
Mid-way through the book comes a poem with this disarming title, “Words Make Sense – It’s in their Union Contract.” Alluding to the vagaries of age and disabilities, the poem moves toward the even keel of acceptance. While the speaker massages her beloved’s feet, she wonders if anyone will “notice the irony of 600 count sheets when sleep is only / a metaphor.”
In a wonderful extended poem, “Gregory,” the reader is introduced to, of all things, a – pet rock! Gregory is a large beach find who resides with the speaker. He is silent, yet:
He fills the room with presence,
chants in a humble monotone.
Is what I hear when I sit and am quiet
a congregation of molecules dancing,
tingling cymbals of silica?
Or is this plain chant, monophonic old song?
The poet signals resiliency in a poem about the “Black Dog” of depression, “Would a T. Rex or a Kraken Be a Better Pet?” Pollack writes, “I ought to call him Millstone. / We are in a marriage but there is no divorce.” These poems consider but do not dwell on sad or constrictive aspects of disability.
Near the end of this book, the speaker breathes in fresh air outside a cabin as she approaches the final decades of life in the poem, “Road Trip.” How tempting it is to keep looking in the rearview mirror, while even the side mirror “seduces.” The poet adds sage commentary, “What we are leaving / will get along splendidly without us.”
Sylvia Byrne Pollack’s debut collection contains skillful poetry delivered with irresistible irony. Both curiosity and her credentials as a Research Professor Emeritus enable Pollack to include bits of science in her poetry to illuminate concerns of aging, hearing disability, and mental illness. The poems in Risking It convey resilience and an acceptance of the foibles of life. This book will give hope to readers.
Mary Ellen Talley’s book reviews appear online and in print journals such as Compulsive Reader, Asheville Poetry Review, Crab Creek Review, Sugar House Review, Entropy, and Empty Mirror. Her poems have appeared in many publications including Raven Chronicles, Gyroscope, and Banshee, as well as in multiple anthologies. Her chapbook, “Postcards from the Lilac City,” was recently published by Finishing Line Press.
