Our Lady of the Ruins by Traci Brimhall
A Review by Lindsay Miller, Book Reviewer
Having never read Traci Brimhall's first collection of poetry, I was drawn to her second on the strength of the title alone: Our Lady of the Ruins. A lapsed Catholic (you never really get it out of your system), I can't resist a work of art that distorts, complicates, or transforms religious iconography. I love the peculiar beauty of crumbling buildings and broken statues. And I'm crazy about a good ghost story. Our Lady of the Ruins delivers on all fronts and is a strong contender for my favorite book of poetry this year. I read it in bed while drinking iced mint tea, and in the cool and the quiet every line landed in the middle of my chest like a battering ram. The dust and grit of Brimhall's lush yet merciless language (“Say the heart is an ungodly machine. / Say the bell breaks inside the bone clock.”) collected on my skin, and I carried it around with me for days. This collection weaves narrative seamlessly into lyricism to map a vivid geography of ashes and exile.
In Our Lady of the Ruins, a group of women wanders a dystopian landscape scarred by war, revolution, and plague. A transcendent, timeless quality shimmers among the wreckage and corpses, gnawed by wolves and bitten by flies. Everything here is cracked and gorgeous, but this is not a book about making something beautiful out of broken things – transformation is too simple for these women. Instead, they let the carnage lie where it falls. “There is no paradise / waiting for us, so why ask for miracles?” says one of them (or perhaps all of them) in “Dance, Glory.” The world Brimhall has created is haunted not by its dead, but by its survivors.
Brimhall's transmutations of Catholic imagery, her destitute saints and shattered relics, suggest a devout but disappointed faith – a hope that knows it's hopeless. There are martyrs in this world, but no one is saved by their sacrifices. Their prayers meander in aimless circles. “The awful silence in your heart / is not the peace you were promised, / … not God's silence, but his breathlessness,” Brimhall tells her weary protagonists in “Gnostic Fugue.” If there are divine beings somewhere in this rubble, they are just as bitter and lost as anyone else.
“No, the abyss isn't infinite. A half-light lurks even there,” one of Brimhall's supplicants admits in “The Labyrinth.” The proverbial light at the end of the tunnel might offer salvation, or at least guidance, but moments of unalloyed hope are so vanishingly rare in Our Lady of the Ruins that it's difficult to read this as optimism. In this world of danger and decay, Brimhall's protagonists might prefer the questionable grace of darkness, the ability simply to not see. The women in Our Lady of the Ruins are constantly engaged in this kind of negotiation with fate, poised between two kinds of surrender – giving in to hope or giving in to despair. “What if / the world doesn't end here?” Brimhall asks in “The Colussus,” answering herself with “Everything will come true – / the flood, the famine, the miracle.” Here, even miracles are met with resignation. These women don't have the energy to wonder; they're too worn out from simply surviving.
One of the collection's strongest poems, “A Year Between Wars,” appears early in the book and sets a tone that reverberates throughout the rest of the text. In “A Year Between Wars,” a society grasps tenuously at its own sanity; an unstable peace holds sway, a fear unfurling from the past as well as the future. Neither the first war nor the second is described; the reader must infer the destruction which has occurred as well as that which is yet to come. “Each week we build a new god and take the ashes of yesterday's god to the sea.” What do you do when you know that a healing bone is about to break again, along the same line as before?
This is the question which haunts Our Lady of the Ruins, a premonitory flinch – not just the anguish, but the exhaustion which follows. Brimhall's honed and muscular language, stripped to its essentials but still lush and evocative, renders even this exhaustion beautiful: “Every day the same parade of ignorance and crows. / Every day thirsting for edible gods,” she writes in “Music from a Burning Piano.” The thrum of unfulfilled need is palpable throughout the text, settling into the body as something familiar, like a hunger so old it becomes another organ.
These poems inhabit a tense space where disaster intersects with domesticity, transforming the traditionally feminine sphere of home and family. An apocalypse is happening, but someone still has to tuck the children in at night. The traumatized and surviving female body becomes a metaphor for the severed root, for a deep and inexorable sense of being un-homed. Brimhall writes the after-effects of trauma, personal, cultural, and global. Yet these women are not victims, at least not wholly victims. They are complicit in their own defining disaster. “Yes, I profited from war. My children lived. / They ate apricots and honey,” one confesses defiantly in “Prayer to the Deaf Madonna.” These poems hold a deep understanding of what kind of sacrifices desperation may require – how such sins might be a kind of grace.
This is a deadly world, full of loss and brutality. “The bilingual murderers recite lamentations in one tongue, and in another, young myths.” At the center of Brimhall's ruined civilization, twin strands of mourning and rejuvenation twine together, becoming the rope that binds the body to the earth. Our Lady of the Ruins is by turns painful, startling, heartbreaking, and luminous. Ultimately, it is a hymn to survival in all its ugliness and magic. Traci Brimhall has created something uniquely moving in her new collection. Hallelujah.
In Our Lady of the Ruins, a group of women wanders a dystopian landscape scarred by war, revolution, and plague. A transcendent, timeless quality shimmers among the wreckage and corpses, gnawed by wolves and bitten by flies. Everything here is cracked and gorgeous, but this is not a book about making something beautiful out of broken things – transformation is too simple for these women. Instead, they let the carnage lie where it falls. “There is no paradise / waiting for us, so why ask for miracles?” says one of them (or perhaps all of them) in “Dance, Glory.” The world Brimhall has created is haunted not by its dead, but by its survivors.
Brimhall's transmutations of Catholic imagery, her destitute saints and shattered relics, suggest a devout but disappointed faith – a hope that knows it's hopeless. There are martyrs in this world, but no one is saved by their sacrifices. Their prayers meander in aimless circles. “The awful silence in your heart / is not the peace you were promised, / … not God's silence, but his breathlessness,” Brimhall tells her weary protagonists in “Gnostic Fugue.” If there are divine beings somewhere in this rubble, they are just as bitter and lost as anyone else.
“No, the abyss isn't infinite. A half-light lurks even there,” one of Brimhall's supplicants admits in “The Labyrinth.” The proverbial light at the end of the tunnel might offer salvation, or at least guidance, but moments of unalloyed hope are so vanishingly rare in Our Lady of the Ruins that it's difficult to read this as optimism. In this world of danger and decay, Brimhall's protagonists might prefer the questionable grace of darkness, the ability simply to not see. The women in Our Lady of the Ruins are constantly engaged in this kind of negotiation with fate, poised between two kinds of surrender – giving in to hope or giving in to despair. “What if / the world doesn't end here?” Brimhall asks in “The Colussus,” answering herself with “Everything will come true – / the flood, the famine, the miracle.” Here, even miracles are met with resignation. These women don't have the energy to wonder; they're too worn out from simply surviving.
One of the collection's strongest poems, “A Year Between Wars,” appears early in the book and sets a tone that reverberates throughout the rest of the text. In “A Year Between Wars,” a society grasps tenuously at its own sanity; an unstable peace holds sway, a fear unfurling from the past as well as the future. Neither the first war nor the second is described; the reader must infer the destruction which has occurred as well as that which is yet to come. “Each week we build a new god and take the ashes of yesterday's god to the sea.” What do you do when you know that a healing bone is about to break again, along the same line as before?
This is the question which haunts Our Lady of the Ruins, a premonitory flinch – not just the anguish, but the exhaustion which follows. Brimhall's honed and muscular language, stripped to its essentials but still lush and evocative, renders even this exhaustion beautiful: “Every day the same parade of ignorance and crows. / Every day thirsting for edible gods,” she writes in “Music from a Burning Piano.” The thrum of unfulfilled need is palpable throughout the text, settling into the body as something familiar, like a hunger so old it becomes another organ.
These poems inhabit a tense space where disaster intersects with domesticity, transforming the traditionally feminine sphere of home and family. An apocalypse is happening, but someone still has to tuck the children in at night. The traumatized and surviving female body becomes a metaphor for the severed root, for a deep and inexorable sense of being un-homed. Brimhall writes the after-effects of trauma, personal, cultural, and global. Yet these women are not victims, at least not wholly victims. They are complicit in their own defining disaster. “Yes, I profited from war. My children lived. / They ate apricots and honey,” one confesses defiantly in “Prayer to the Deaf Madonna.” These poems hold a deep understanding of what kind of sacrifices desperation may require – how such sins might be a kind of grace.
This is a deadly world, full of loss and brutality. “The bilingual murderers recite lamentations in one tongue, and in another, young myths.” At the center of Brimhall's ruined civilization, twin strands of mourning and rejuvenation twine together, becoming the rope that binds the body to the earth. Our Lady of the Ruins is by turns painful, startling, heartbreaking, and luminous. Ultimately, it is a hymn to survival in all its ugliness and magic. Traci Brimhall has created something uniquely moving in her new collection. Hallelujah.