Belongings: Poems

Yes--"Belongings explores the question: Where, how, and to what do you belong?" in its four sections: I. Belongings;II. A Little Night Music; III. Four Masks; IV. A Year and A Day. Finally reading Sandra Gilbert's poetry after reading her gathering of elegies in "Inventions of Farewell," and her incisive synthesis of modern mourning in "Death's Door," I come to this collection with a clearer eye to what drives her--her occupations and pre-occupations. It's a travel log of sorts. We listen to jazz at Yoshi's in Berkeley, savor cafe life in the Marais District in Paris, learn about the true nature of mosquitos in St. Petersburg, touch down in Sicily--point of origin, take an afternoon walk at The Sea Ranch on the Mendocino Coast. Yet, at its heart, I feel the collection in its markings of losses and longings cuts deeper into the vast canyon of the elegaic tradition that Gilbert illuminates so well in her two books mentioned above. Gilbert is ever searching to solve the puzzle of spirit within the material world--and wanting to mend any impending split. "What happens to belongings after the grave? They'll be up here and she--she'll be down there what of the stuff she worked so hard to have? . . . don't let my belongings go astray. . . " (P. 23) Gilbert ends the tour de force of her closing section "A Year and A Day" with the hopeful poem of potentiality, "The New Tree" ". . . purple leaves that haven't happened yet, though somewhere in, or under, the flayed thin skin of the new tree they wait and plan." Maybe, in the end, it is to the beginnings that we belong. --Janet Grace Riehl, author Sightlines: A Poet's Diary