Indigo

by Ellen Bass

Indigo, the newest collection by Ellen Bass, merges elegy and praise poem in an exploration of life's complexities. Whether her subject is oysters, high heels, a pork chop, a beloved dog, or a wife's return to health, Bass pulls us in with exquisite immediacy. Her lush and precisely observed descriptions allow us to feel the sheer primal pleasure of being alive in our own "succulent skin," the pleasure of the gifts of hunger, desire, touch. In this book, joy meets regret, devotion meets dependence, and most importantly, the poet so in love with life and living begins to look for the point where the price of aging overwhelms the rewards of staying alive. Bass is relentless in her advocacy for the little pleasures all around her. Her gaze is both expansive and hyperfocused, celebrating (and eulogizing) each gift as it is given and taken, while also taking stock of the larger arc. She draws the lines between generations, both remembering her parents' lives and deaths and watching her own children grow into the space that she will leave behind. Indigo shows us the beauty of this cycle, while also documenting the deeply human urge to resist change and hang on to the life we have, even as it attempts to slip away.

Genres: Poetry, LGBT, Queer, Feminism, School, Lesbian

64 pages, Paperback

First published April 7, 2020

About the author

Ellen Bass is an American poet and author.

Reviews

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loving, angry, raw, mournful, sensual, playful . . . Ellen Bass hits all the notes so that you feel them fill your lungs, your belly, your heart. Indigo touches down frequently into a landscape of grief: a mother's death, a wife's illness, an ex-husband's failings, but there are also moments of great delight and quiet joy. The natural world, the vulnerable, changing, beautiful human body, the poet's regrets and delights as she enters this later phase of life - all are rendered in exquisite, visceral detail.

One of my favorite poets for the permission she gives me to revel and grieve in all the ways so particular to being a woman, Ellen Bass has touched me deeply once again.

[David Abrams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of these poems--nay, many of them--were like that logo on Arm and Hammer baking soda: a bicep flexed, uncurled, a hammer coming down, hard, on the top of my head, leaving me dazed and dazzled and with a head wreathed in chirping birds, all of them beak-clicking and wing-chattering to me with their beauty. That's a long way of saying I loved these stanzas.

[Ron Mohring · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really needed this book right now. These poems are so skillfully honed they feel effortlessly made, with a voice that's intimate, attentive to wonder and to the smallest details. How lucky to be alive and attuned, to be able to craft such necessary poems with grief and love and awe and--well, gratitude. I'm going back to read all her previous work.

[Hannah Showalter · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars! every ellen bass book i read is like a masterclass in perfect poetry. loves how she takes these little moments and drops us inside them. i can see and feel everything up close!! like i’m there!!

[Brittany Mishra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ellen is a master wordsmith. She has the ability to translate the everyday, to focus the reader's attention to the unnoticed, the small. Her poem Ode to Fat, what a triumph of taking a personal experience of her wife and building a poem that is both focused personal and so universal.

"Bless butter. Bless brie./
Sanctify schmaltz. And cream and cashews./ Stole the furnace/ of the stomach and load the vessels. Darling,/
Drench yourself in opulent oil,/
The lamp of your body glowing."

Her poems touch on the domestic, on children and birth, love and worship and the body. When I think I've pinned down what Bass can do, she does something different, she shifts her focus, she keeps moving into living.

[Kelly Grace Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such softness and suffering in the ways we are ravaged and replenished by love. So many beautiful poems including "Sous Chef" "Ode to Fat" and "Sing Your Fingers Into the Darkness of my Fur"

[Alex Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good writing magnifies the ordinary, and that's exactly what Ellen Bass does her. From the memories of loved ones to marriages to a grizzly bear to taking the dog out to pee, Bass finds the beauty in it all. "You may have to break / your heart, but it isn't nothing / to know even one moment alive." She generously offers a peek into her own life, the loveliness and the ugliness.

Her writing shows that poetry can be striking without being inscrutable. I found myself struck by the ordinary observations Bass makes so tangible: the love of someone else making decisions ("Sous-Chef"), tragedy making beauty sweeter ("Any Common Desolation"), the treasure of lasting love ("Getting into Bed on a December Night"), the despair of seeing someone experience something that you cannot grasp ("The Kitchen Counter"), the glimpse into what could have been ("Indigo").

Guess I'm going to read the rest of her books now.

[emma charlton · Rating 4 out of 5]

don’t let the cover fool you, this is good

[Amorak Huey · Rating 5 out of 5]

You’re going to have to excuse me. After spending time in these lovely, smart poems, I am going to spend the rest of my life staring vacantly into the middle distance, consumed by my mortality and the temporariness of love.

[Adrian Alvarez · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most affecting poetry books I have read in a while. Also very accessible, for anyone who worries poetry just isn't for them. The craft work in these poems is exceptional and nearly invisible for the reader. I had to re-read some of them several times just to figure out how they worked so powerfully. The first read some of them were just magical. Like, they magically wetted my eyes and made me think of my mortality all day.

Here's one of my favorites:

Taking My Old Dog Out to Pee before Bed

Zeke's hips are too ground down
to lift a leg, so he just stands there. We both
just stand, looking into the darkness.
The moon silvers his thinning fur.
Orion strides across the heavens, his own dog
trotting at his heel. And a great live oak reaches over
from the neighbor's yard, dense black limbs
silhouetted against a paler sky. Single voluptuous
remnant of forests. Can a tree be lonely?
Zeke tips up his muzzle, scent streaming
through two hundred million olfactory cells
as he reads the illuminated manuscript of night-
raccoons prowling down the street, who's in heat
or just out for a stroll. Handsome still,
he reminds me of an aging movie star with his striking
white eyebrows and square jaw. He always
had an urbane elegance, a gentleman
who could carry off satin lapels and a silver-tipped cane.
Tonight an ambulance wails. Someone not so far away
is frightened, in pain, trying to live or trying to die.
And then it's quiet again. No birds. No wind.
We don't speak. We just wait, alive together,
until one of us turns back to the door
and the other follows.


This poem really moved me. So much that I sought out Ellen Bass' twitter account just to see if she had posted any photos of Zeke. I was not disappointed. Well, a little disappointed. RIP to that handsome little guy.

[Caitlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

"There was no beauty
when I sat at the kitchen table, breaking

open the pinkish capsules, dividing the granules
so she could swallow the precise promise,

where she lay in the backyard wrapped in quilts
every night staring up through the branches, stars

flecked in the black-veined sky.
There was no time

out there. Or time was large enough to hold her.
One moon slowly rolling over. I waited

long as I could. Then we began.
A bath. Tea. Litanies

of consolation, though she was inconsolable.
I rubbed her feet before the door

which led to a sleepless night or
to the night of us split

into the cells of our separate dreams. Through the window,
the patience of trees.

I was so tired. I told myself she wasn't dead.
She wasn't dying. I called it the hellhole.

It's only with distance
we can bear the beauty

of that much burning, the light
having traveled so long, so far."

-- This Was the Door

[Isla McKetta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exquisite.

[Laura Sackton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely loved this. So beautiful, so honest, so celebratory, sad and humble and full of joy and full of pain. Just lovely. Can't wait to read more of Bass's work.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ellen Bass never, ever, EVER, disappoints. She’s a goddess.

[kara · Rating 5 out of 5]

yeah idec ellen bass just gets it. Lizard cpr is unforgettable

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The patience of trees.” Sit and savor that for a minute. Ellen Bass’s poetry continues to be a wonder to me. As a teacher, she teaches poets to create “moments,” and she does that well in this latest collection, whether it’s slipping into bed with her wife, taking her old dog out to pee, or living through an ultrasound after a suspicious mammogram. She mixes these moments with heavy and light elements to create concoctions that take my breath away. In just five lines in “On My Father’s Illness,” she captures the essence of a woman losing her husband, wishing she could still be like other wives and sit in the passenger seat again. In “I look over and there she is,” she speaks of her lover’s illness and lurking death but ends with “Ice/melting in my glass topples/with a little clink.” I can hear that ice. I am there in that moment. So many wonderful moments fill this book.

[Kaye · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was so good. I loved many of the poems and a few of them nearly made me cry.

[Mary Beth Umholtz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic poems about love, life, domesticity and beauty in the world. Ellen Bass is my new favorite poet. I highly recommend this little collection.

[Kristy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh, Ellen. Light of my life.

This collection feels different than her others to me, almost more distinctive. Mules of Love and Like A Beggar feel, tonally, very similar to me. Younger, almost, although she was already married twice with grown children when she wrote them. The Human Line processes her mothers death, and then this - Indigo - feels like such a natural progression after that. It's not the mourning of the recently heartbroken, but the reflections that only come with distance. And yet - that distance doesn't make her poetry any less intimate, any less urgent or deeply felt.

"Taking My Old Dog Out to Pee before Bed" and "Ode to Zeke" commemorate her aging dog. "Fungus on Fallen Alder at Lookout Creek" details the rotting of a tree. "Any Common Desolation" brings it all together - the despair of life, the hope found in its small details.

There are love poems to her wife ("Ode to Fat," "Getting Into Bed on a December Night," "Marriage"), but again, these are not the poems of honeymoon-struck lovers but of the long haul - the love through sickness, health, anger, fear.

This visceral
bloody union that is love, but
beyond love. Beyond charm and delight
the way you yourself are past charm and delight.
This is the shucked meat of love, the alleys and broken
glass of love, the dizzy, hoarse cry, the stubborn hunger.
(Marriage, p36)

She writes about growing up - about assault ("Because what We Do Does Not Die") and her father's illness ("Failure"). Shopping with her mother ("The Orange-and-White High-Heeled Shoes") and then eventually, with a very different tone, shopping with her own daughter ("Indigo").

I can just never get enough of Ellen Bass and already look forward to pouring over all of these poems again. One read through (let alone one measly goodreads review) couldn't possibly do them all justice.

[David Curry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have a soft spot for poets whom I can imagine writing about a hamburger. They are few, and Ellen Bass is one of the best of them — appetitive, appreciative, and ever sensory.

Her latest collection, INDIGO, opens with “Sous Chef,” which includes these lines:

With all that’s destroyed, look
how the world still holds a golden pear.
Freckled and floral, a shimmering marvel.

We also get, bless her, an “Ode to Fat.” Then there’s “Ode to the Pork Chop” and “Taking My Old Dog Out to Pee Before Bed.”

Bass continues to give us some of the most moving love poems of our time. As the object of her love ages, the love deepens. “Taking Off the Front of the House” concludes with this:



And as she turns toward me and I feel again
the marvelous architecture of her hips, the moon,
that expert in lighting, rises over the roofline
flooding us in her flawless silvery wash.

“Sometimes I’m Frightened” closes with:

Sometimes I can taste the distance between us. Rain
trembles on the camellia’s waxy leaves and spills
bead by bead from the tips. I can remember
being a child, opening my mouth to the rain.

From “Any Common Desolation”:

“Warm socks. You remember your mother,
her precision a ceremony, as she gathered
the white cotton, slipped it over your toes,
drew up the heel, turned the cuff.

Everything there is arresting and tactile, and nothing is, or needs to be, referential to anything other than itself.

Let me quote one striking poem in its entirety:

FUNGUS ON FALLEN ALDER AT LOOKOUT CREEK

Florid, fluted, flowery petal, flounce
of a girl’s dress, ruffled fan,
striped in what seems to my eye
an excess of extravagance,
intricately ribboned like a secret
code, a colorist’s vision of DNA.
At the outermost edge a scallop
of ivory, then a tweedy russet,
then mouse gray, a crescent
of celadon velvet, a streak of sleek seal brown,
a dark arc of copper, then butter,
then celadon again, again butter, again
copper and on into the center, striped thinner
and thinner to the green, green moss-furry heart.
How can this be necessary?
Yet it grows and is making more
of itself, dozens and dozens of tiny starts, stars
no bigger than a baby’s thumbnail,
all of them sucking one young dead tree
on a gravel bank that will be washed away
in the next flooding winter. But isn’t the air here
cool and wet and almost unbearably sweet?

Thank you, Ellen Bass, for another treasure. I look forward to your next.

[Philip Kenner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ellen Bass has my heart. My current favorite poem of all time, “I Could Touch It,” lives in this collection.

Bass writes of and in the earth. Her poems are testaments to humanity’s bizarre ability to be completely in the moment and totally somewhere else, all at the same time. There are fires and oceans and clouds and roots and birds and bees and blood and bone, and Bass makes it her job to notice and chew them all.

Also, this book is sexy. The cover may already suggest that, but it bears repeating. Some of the poems in this book are downright horny, and we’re better for it.

I took two of Ellen Bass’ poetry classes over the last six months, and she is as luminous and generous a thinker as her poetry would suggest. I’d recommend the classes heartily to anyone interested.

I am including snippets of my favorite poems below, in no particular order. Don’t read further if this counts as a spoiler:

ROSES - “Death woke me each morning / with its bird impersonation.”

ODE TO ZEKE - “I’ll fry you a fish. I’ll sit by your bowl. / Eat from my hand. I have nowhere to go.”

BECAUSE - “I lay there with the baby whimpering in my arms, / both of us wide awake in the darkness.”

FAILURE - “This was my first / entrance into the land of failure, a country / I would visit so often / it would begin to feel like home.”

And, of course, I COULD TOUCH IT: “As sage gives its scent when you crush it. As stone / is hard. They were happy and I could touch it.”

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

21/31

My first Ellen Bass. I get the hype. It took me a rather long time to get here, but I am glad I am here. What a lovely collection.

Instead of quoting for the remainder of the Sealey Challenge, for which I am woefully behind in posting (and some in reading), I am just going to list the poems I loved:

From Indigo--Ellen Bass
"Black Coffee"
"Taking My Old Dog to Pee Before Bed"
"The Kitchen Counter"
"Not Dead Yet"
"Fungus on Fallen Alder at Lookout Creek"
"I look over and there she is"
"Indigo"

[Mia Sitterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I happened to choose the first and last poems from this collection — “Sous Chef” (in June 2022) and “Any Common Desolation” (in Dec 2023) — for poetry night reading/analysis. I still think those are the best poems in here, but these are some other lines I liked:

“Revered and sacrificed, / body and salty liquor of the soul, / the oyster is devoured, surrendering / all—again and again.”

“And yet… / this little hat of life, how will I bear / to take it off while I can still reach up?”

“I know you think I have secret motives sewn like pearls into the hem of / my coat.”

[Dorothy Mahoney · Rating 5 out of 5]

From a 5 line poem like "On my Father's Illness" to the 60 line title poem "Indigo", Ellen Bass
flexes her poetic muscles in this collection. "Ode to Zeke" her praise of her aging dog ends: "I'll fry you a fish. I'll sit by your bowl./ Eat from my hand. I have nowhere to go." For Ellen Bass fans, this
is an awaited book with several odes and praise poems. Take your time, at this point in time, there's nowhere to go...

[Edgar Trevizo · Rating 2 out of 5]

I adore Ellen. That’s where I want to start. I’ve read her three previous books countless times, in love. I’ve translated her to spanish for my friends to enjoy. I just love her. But this book. It doesn’t even seems like her writing. Something very important is missing here. Adam Zagajewski says that every poem has to contain the whole world in it. That’s her previous books. This one doesn’t even contain a small town.

[Zoie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written. Ellen Bass finds a way to transform the regular details of life into something that brings goosebumps to your skin. You mourn the things she never did alongside her, feel the guilt of her confessions as deeply as if they were your own. I haven’t read a book that made me feel so invested and in awe of the author’s talent in years. Please, please, please do yourself a favor and read this book.

[Josette · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredible book. I have read it through twice, some of the poems three or four times. The intimacy conveyed with a single phrase like “I rubbed her feet” or “oh, you were lean that terrifying year” kept hitting me over and over. I’d think about my own marriage, my own father or mother, and feel wistful and loving because the poems brought me to that tender bruise. “I’m old / enough to know there’s nothing / we love without incurring / the debt of grief.”

[Quoth the Robyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bass's language, words, and concepts challenged me in remarkable ways and I found myself constantly learning throughout the collection. However, I felt that there was a lack of connectivity between the poems and it felt like I was watching two or three different stories taking place without much depth into them. I still loved the poems I encountered and they were each beautiful individually, but as a whole, there was something missing tying everything together.

[Mary Camille Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gift of the pandemic was that Santa Cruz poet Ellen Bass took her “living room craft talks” online to Zoom, where people all over the world, including me right here in Santa Cruz, can learn from a master. I have to admit, I hadn’t read her poetry before I took the class, and now I’m a fan. “It isn’t nothing to know even one moment alive,” she writes in the poem “Any Common Desolation, and this collection woke me up to many moments of being alive. Highly recommended!

[Amie Whittemore · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very beautiful collection of poems about long love, (long lesbian love in particular), about life's troubles and regrets, about forays into the country of illness, about recovery, about gratitude, about sex and its tethers. Bass's style is straightforward yet musical, accessible in a good way--she points to the heart's matters and say here, this is what matters. In other words, a great gift for the folks in your life who need poetry but who are afraid of poetry that "doesn't make sense."