Cures Include Travel

I like books that take me someplace I've never been before. Susan Rich's Cures Include Travel takes me to many such places--Somalia, Bosnia, South Africa, Ireland, Iraq. Rich has traveled to and worked in many troubled parts of the world. Her poems capture these places with their landscape, customs, and tribulations. Again and again, Rich expresses compassion for people and opposition to all forms of oppression. Using stunning images, she evokes the sounds, smells, and colors of each location. She brings the world alive with flowers--hibiscus, hydrangeas, begonias, amaranth, blue oleander. And she stimulates taste buds with culinary delights--blueberry scones, rum babas, chocolate roulade. In "What the Baker Wants," one of my favorite poems, she asks, "Oh, what does the tongue know/ that our hearts cannot? / Tiramisu and lemon tarts." Interspersed among the poems of global concerns are more personal ones of romantic relationships and the pain of a mother's death from cancer. In these more personal poems, food is again used to create image and evoke emotion. In another of my favorites, "A Poem for Will, Baking," Rich catalogs the confections Will bakes to escape the pain of grief, then ends: "...he creates the most fragile / of confections: madelines / and pinwheels, pomegranate crisps / and blue florentines; / each crumb to reincarnate / a woman--a savoring / of what the living once could bring." Rich conveys her love for the places and people of this troubled world and brings that world into sharp focus with the skill of a photographer or a painter. The result is an outstanding collection of poetry.

Read Cures Include Travel at least twice--the first time to dwell in the house of each surprising and gloriously musical poem, the second time to let go and travel. In a voice by turns wistful, bemused, sometimes grieving, sometimes resolute or playful, Susan Rich holds the whole world in her imagination, a rare gift in an age of self-absorption. In poems like "Everyone in Bosnia Loves Begonias," "Fissure" (where the scene is South Africa), and "The Women of Kismayo," she pulls the reader into the larger, troubled but irresistible world. The harrowing poem "Mohamud at the Mosque" opens our eyes to life in this America, and is one of the best 9/11 poems I've read. Rich's observance of everyday life, the bittersweet poems for her mother, and the sensual, hungry-making love poems ("What the Baker Wants" should not be read alone or too far from a dessert tray), give this voice a body and a past and make all the poems in this beautiful collection resonate as real life.