Song and Spectacle

by Rachel Rose

Song and Spectacle, the third collection by award-winning poet Rachel Rose, is composed of fierce hymns to the particular and universal struggles of birth, passion and loss, and the paradoxical quest for non-attachment in a treacherous, unpredictable and yet deeply beloved world.

Rose delves into the world of myth, using the stories of Daphne and Peneus, Shamhat and Enkidu and Grendel’s mother to create new allegories for our times. Her poems also explore the aftereffects of suicide on those left behind, the truths of lesbian motherhood and the exquisite splendour of the natural world. Thus, even as she celebrates the cherry trees that “. . . create a spectacle, tossing their wet confetti/ at the window. A child’s hair falls out/ on her pillow. Blood pools under the skin of the sky,” she holds always the synchronous reality of beauty and pain, death and birth, love and loss, at the heart of her poetry. This hard-won knowledge makes her world and her words unforgettable.

Genres: Poetry, Queer

112 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 25, 2012

About the author

Rachel Rose is the author of The Octopus Has Three Hearts, longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2021. As well, she is the author of four collections of poetry, including Marry & Burn, which received a 2016 Pushcart Prize, and was a finalist for a Governor General’s Award. Her memoir, The Dog Lover Unit: Lessons in Courage from the World’s K9 Cops, was shortlisted for the 2018 Arthur Ellis award for best non-fiction crime book. A former fellow at The University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, she is the Poet Laureate Emerita of Vancouver and Co-Director of Vancouver Manuscript Intensive (https://vancouvermanuscriptintensive.... )

Reviews

[Candace Walsh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read Song & Spectacle for months because I just could not barrel through it. Each poem is like a response from the oracle you travel to once a year. You need time to digest it. Or. Each poem is like a gorgeous candy version of a Fabergé egg. Only a barbarian would gobble them down one after the other. This may not be the case for other readers, but it is for me. I have never met Rachel Rose, but I feel that our writer souls have a kinship. I call it being in the same tribe as a particular muse. I hope that we are.

We need poets like Rose because we need someone to take banal, everyday topics like "how do you get over a childhood trauma?" and spin them into healing, sinuous gold, as in "Mystery," which begins, "Not what was done to you, girl/but how you survived it" and near the conclusion, allows, "You let what happened once/become a legend, a long time ago." Anyone reading this review might cry out, "How?" but you won't have that question if you ramble through her poems, or if, like me, you take them sparingly, like medicine, or hits of heady rapture.

Rose takes on other topics, capturing the mirror-neuroned adrenaline rush of a mob, free of glorification or judgment, just notices it so that we can get closer to understanding it, recognize it, be conscious enough to resist it without disowning it. In a way, that's an ongoing theme of the book, engaging with the disowned so that we can be less unconscious around it. When we are less unconscious around disowned topics, we are more conscious in general--every single sense sings, everything can be seen more gloriously.

If you are a parent, have had parents, have been sick, or well, or lost, or loved, there is something here for you.

When I read Rose's poems, I begin seeing the power of words set as precisely and thoughtfully as gems, with plangent imagery, nuanced timpani. But not in ornate precious metal settings. I see the gems set in strands of seaweed, crooks of moss. She amplifies, and reorients the way I think about everything around me and inside me, and I can only absorb a bit at a time, as I want it to endure.

[CaseyTheCanadianLesbrarian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this collection to be both comforting and challenging; I think this is because these poems espouse a profound knowledge of both the pain and beauty in the world, and when you’re really immersed in either of those extremes, it’s excruciating to be reminded of the other side. Song & Spectacle made me feel oddly similar to how the contemplation of the universe’s infinity is described in one poem: “We heard it was infinite, beyond / the beyond of the song of songs / And we tried to picture it, but it hurt … We tried to console ourselves … / pressed our eyes with fists and made gold blots ringed in violet.”

Of course, Song & Spectacle is much more than a consolation; it’s a meditation on the impossibility of the simultaneous existence of both the infinite and the finite, and sorrow and joy, in this lovable but volatile world...

See the full review on my website: http://caseythecanadianlesbrarian.wor...

[willowdog]

This illuminating collection of poetry by feminist lesbian poet Rachel Rose is a beautiful look at everyday things, literature, poetry, and motherhood. The works are so skillful. She draws you in. However, although written with a lesbian voice, her sexuality is only obviously present in but 5 or 6 poems. I wish she would have spoken more directly. I'm giving it my first "?" of the year. In this case, is the lesbian content enough? Help.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetry that sings and reveals, Song & Spectacle is a collection of poetry that reaches for you and takes you, not only by the hand but around the wrist, too: come, see this, it says, tugging you along towards moments of loss and love and the complications of these two together.