While with an eye made quiet by the power
of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
—Wordsworth
Poet Ellen Bass sees into the life of things, creating a poetry that goes straight to the heart, in a voice that speaks to us clearly and intimately about the subjects of daily living: community, family, domestic life and sexual love. There are poems of political consciousness, personal, cultural, historical and environmental awareness, all of it handled with humor and grace. Mules of Love is luminous with the ordinary: an afternoon in the garden, a family car trip, a visionary moment on the front lawn with a neighbor, moments we are apt to miss the deeper significance of if we don’t pay careful attention.
What is the poet’s job but to help us to become aware of life’s transience, love’s power, the subtle manifestations of hope, to play for us again the ancient themes. When she speaks, her authority is clear, her wisdom and compassion evident. To her lover she offers her strength: “Bring me your pain, love. Spread / it out like fine rugs, / silk sashes, warm eggs, cinnamon / and cloves in burlap sacks. Show me.…” She commiserates with the goddess Demeter: “In the story it sounds like sorrow’s over. / They don’t write how it never leaves, how it sounds in every / wind, in every rain, soaks / your heart like rain soaks the fields.” In a poem to her daughter she recognizes the complicated weight of our love:
You dug me out like a well. You lit
the deadwood of my heart. You pinned me
to the earth with the points of stars.…
Massive the burden this flesh
must learn to bear, like mules of love.
Unafraid of the full range of human emotion, Bass also applies humor to the taboo subjects of sex, religion and death: “If this were the last / day of my life, I wouldn’t / complain about the curtain rod …” and in “Birds Do It”: “The young imagine lovers young, / sleek as tapers, waxy, gleaming. / And worry that their own lumpy legs, / pimples, hair thin as cilia—/ will shut them out, / tick them off the assembly line like seconds.” In “God and the G-Spot,” she positions herself firmly between the sacred and the profane: “Belief and disbelief / are a pair of tourists standing on swollen feet / in the Prado—I don’t like it. / do.—before the Picasso.”
Bass is a poet of the elemental, always struggling to manage the science and biology of life with the mysteries of religion, philosophy and consciousness. It’s as if she is so startled to be alive, she can’t help asking every moment to stop and let her examine it, ask it a question. In “Insomnia” she finds herself awake while the world is at rest and commiserates with others afflicted with similar hungers.
All over the world, people can’t sleep.
In different time zones, they are lying awake,
bodies still, minds trudging along like child laborers.
…may something
comfort you—a mockingbird, a breeze, the smell
of crushed mint, Chopin’s Nocturnes,
your child’s birth, a kiss,
or even me—in my chilly kitchen
with my coat over my nightgown—thinking of you.
Compassion and connection are among her gods, and so she exhorts the sleepless masses to seek the consolation of their own interwoven and quietly miraculous lives. In this age of violence and disconnection, as we spend more and more time looking for a technological fix, this kind of poetry is a necessary reminder to see our lives as a continuum of ordinary days, each bountiful, spacious, precious. Ellen Bass has created a woman who stands on the edge of her life, looking for the moment that might change us all.
—Dorianne Laux