by Chris Banks

“Poetry is inside talking to inside”, Donald Hall the American poet and essayist once wrote, but what he did not say is that most often, at its core, poetry is one stranger talking to another stranger. And few do it better than Rhea Tregebov.

I have read her latest collection Talking To Strangers published by Véhicule Press twice–a collection about grief and Havana bars and ancient hippies and defunct video cameras and, of course, encounters with strangers–and I am simply beaming as I write this. And Tregebov employs so many forms! Quatrains and tercets; squat long-lined somersaulting poems; and villanelles; and short-lined, minimalist one-two punches!

This collection is a master class in description and brevity. Elizabeth Taylor has “cornflower blue eyes”, and the taste of marmalade on toast becomes “the tang of someone gone twenty years now” and the passing of an older sister is described as a “blur, blank I can’t see, can’t see past.” 

There are no cliches anywhere to clog “the neural networks of the skull, soul.” This is a book written slowly, deliberately, and scrupulously edited.

I think to show you what I mean I will start with one of those “one-two punch” poems I was talking about. Short poems I usually find are under-developed, uninteresting, as it is very hard to make a poem interesting, dance at the best of times, let alone in a poem under twelve  lines. But check out this poem “Wall” where she builds a world in a small space, but a world with dividing walls:

Wall

Tired, a bit unsteady, I lean
against you, moss giving
underneath my hand. Moss a small
cosmos of valleys and peaks, nations
of trees and shrubs, countries of ferns
and vines. What’s a wall to do?
Hold earth so we’re not buried, water
so we’re not drowned. Keep the good
from the bad. Hold a flood,
landslide of those who want to be
on our side, want to be where
we are, where we don’t want them.


Rhea Tregebov shows “the economy of human consciousness” in this poem, to borrow a phrase from an American master of the short poem Gregory Orr. Here, a walk beside a mossy wall becomes a moment to reflect on the walls humans erect, create not to hold the water out, but to divide us from them, whether that is in human relationships, politics, or in those countries currently at war with each other.

I wrote recently in an essay about Canadian and American poetry that gone are the ‘good ole bad ole days’ when you could write elegantly about picking berries, but Tregebov proves me wrong (I’m wrong quite often) as she has written a beautiful poem about raspberries and human relationships called “Consent”:

Because it’s July, despite a winter those of us in this mild
clime called harsh, because I watered and weeded, and the bees,
despite their losses, did their work, so that the raspberries act
as an education in bounty, and because I can’t abide
waste, especially in this world hungry for food, and beauty,
twice a day, morning and early evening, I go outside to gather.
Because of this plenty, I am picking only those berries
that yield to me, those whose coral is turning to purple,
the ones a gentle tug releases from their white core,
which holds, or the ones that simply fall into my palm.
I say the berries yield, are ripe, but berries are not women
and women are not berries. I don’t what berries want,
to propagate I suppose, but they don’t want in the same way
women do, who are not ripe or not according to the picker’s eye,
who are not plucked, though they may pluck themselves.
I live with a man who can be lying beside me taut with want
and who will, at a word or a touch, because I am angry or
tired or sad, stop. Because it’s easy for me to calmly compare
women to berries and do violence to neither.


Not merely a poem about berry-picking, this is a poem about negotiating consent between lovers, between men and women, about human want and loneliness, and the wish to be touched, and the inherent right not to be. I love the exacting description in this poem of raspberries “whose coral is turning to purple, / the ones a gentle tug releases from their white core” and how this comes to enlarge the ending of the poem “Because it is easy for me to calmly compare / women to berries and do violence to neither.” This poem is so elegant, so right, and anything but simple.

Maybe my favourite poem in the whole collection is Tregebov’s poem “The End of Everything” because of how she stacks the various astrophysical theories on how the universe might end on top of a single thought, a single philosophical base, that every human death is also the end of someone’s world. Here is the ending:

When the astrophysicist is asked
what this has to do with us, she says we are
irrelevant, inconsequential. Perfectly
insignificant. So what do we have to do
with this if we don’t matter? What
is the end of everything, in particular,
us? Maybe this, maybe for us, this: everything
may be one countenance, one single look or,
in these days of pestilence, touch. Someone
we know like the back of our hand, that
someone touching our hand. These are
days of pestilence, days of “excess deaths,”
every day each death a death too many,
each death the end of a world.

This poem took my breath away, and articulates what I have tried to articulate many, many times in poems: that although we are inconsequential, and although we know the world is a spice box of pestilence and pandemics at times, any one death ends a life, a human history, one person’s way of seeing everything, and that, especially, should be grieved.     

I loved Rhea Tregebov’s latest poetry collection Talking To Strangers out with Véhicule Press, and it may just well be my candidate for Canadian poetry book of the year. These poems know the difference between “zest and pith”, and they should be slowly savoured as much for their exacting descriptive imagery, accidental encounters with strangers, and their mastery of myriad poetic forms.

Please pick up a copy of Rhea Tregebov’s Talking To Strangers published by Véhicule Press for yourself!