Journey Bread: New & Selected Poems by Ruth Thompson

Ruth Thompson

Author

Journey Bread: New & Selected Poems

From the publisher: The title of this collection suggests sustenance, and the poetry within certainly supplies that; but it is more an account of the journey itself, the journey of an accomplished poet back through her life’s work. In her preface Ruth Thompson admits that what she first conceived as a conventional “new & selected” volume became something else once she allowed her poems to become what they needed to be, sometimes radically different from how they began, and to “gather themselves into their own pattern” so that “In the end, this book has become a memoir of sorts, a final dance with some old and new poems, and a late-in-life reflection on the journey that brought me here.” This process is thus like the experience of the women she describes in her poem “Journeying West” across the prairie, a trail marked by the things abandoned along the way as unnecessary burdens, “the broken axles of memory and desire” until “in the end / women leave behind everything / but what is in their heads.” What is left in Ruth Thompson’s head is the bread of poetry, and it is sustenance indeed.

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Reviews

The sixth collection from Thompson (author of Quickwater Oracles) is a literary mosaic of recollections, vignettes, and retellings of familiar stories, standing as something of a poet’s memoir—part history, part reinvention, part revision of works from across her career. Thompson guides the reader through intimately mundane moments and scenes of epic proportion, from children half-perching on their great-grandmother to spare her their weight to Penelope at her loom, understanding that “When the Hero comes back from her journey / she is in the greatest danger of all.” Each entry stands alone, but the disparate pieces—united in crisp and incisive language and rhythms that suggest the process of breathing—cohere, suggesting Thompson’s journey across changing landscapes and through passing years, from the wonder of childhood to the griefs and triumphs of maturity.

This marriage of new and (revisited) selected work reveals an experienced poet seeking new modes of expression. Meditating on the language to describe a tree, Thompson writes, "Let me grow a word for this." Indeed, her verse is plantlike, establishing deep roots before stretching sunward; the images are verdant if occasionally disorienting. Though the poems’ subjects vary considerably, nature is a prominent throughline—whether recounting personal history or detouring into myth, Thompson’s eye ceaselessly returns to the natural world. "There's a lot I’m skipping," she admits in "The Cabin,” because, relatably, "I want to get to the blue jays." The effect encourages readers to note details, both on the page and in the world around them.

As a retrospective project, memory is another major theme. Thompson’s portrayal is bittersweet. Memory falters and fails in her poems, but it is also carefully excavated and preserved, sometimes remade: Apollo's priestess is suspended between divination and dementia; an anxious child catches her mother’s proud expression; a father's ghost attends his daughter's wedding. The poems illuminate with fairytales and birdsong both what remains and what has been forgotten. “Memory slips away now,” Thompson reflects, “like a fish you see moving under water, sliding past the hook." Tender, reflective, and finely crafted, Journey Bread baits that hook.

Takeaway: Tender poems of personal history, myth, and meditations on nature.

Comparable Titles: Deborah Digges, Theodore Roethke.

Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A

—Frank Gaspar, author of Late Rapturous & The Poems of Renata Ferreira

Journey Bread is the Viaticum, the last meal, the bread on the tongue of the deceased as she makes her way to the Other World. But Ruth Thompson’s rendering of this offering is very much about life, a vigorous and fascinating life, in poems that are energetic and vital – a woman’s Hijra in words that marvel great distances: from anger and despair, through myth and memory, magic, outcry, love, and into joy, into wholeness. This is a wonderful book by a powerful and accomplished writer.

Philip Terman, author of My Blossoming Everything, This Crazy Devotion, & more

Ruth Thompson’s Journey Bread is a radical book – a recollection, exploration, and re-evaluation of a fully-engaged presence in a richness of styles and forms from a master poet. From narrative memories to dramatic monologues, from Greek to Sumerian to re-cast feminist folktales, from lyrics of love and nature to the spiritual world, the journey of this necessary collection is epic and the bread—the poetry – is its staff. Journey Bread moves me in many ways, through Thompson’s unswerving devotion to the truth of a singular life “singing the song of being alive.”

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