Books
A Possible Trust: The Poetry of Ronna Bloom
Published by Wilfred Laurier University Press
With compassion, humour and sharp-eyed irreverence, Ronna Bloom's work has made a significant impact on Canadian poetry. A Possible Trust is selected from her work to date.
Bloom writes concisely of the precarious, the ephemeral, the epic, and of the fragility and determination of people in daily life and extraordinary health crises. She is attentive to suffering, as well as to spontaneous connections and gestures of love. Her poetry has been used by teachers, architects, spiritual leaders, and in hospitals across Canada. This is poetry engaged with spontaneity, presence, work, and health care. There is a tenderness here where living matters, as does dying, a valuing of the incident, the encounter, the unexpected, the sorrow and the bowl-me-over delight.
Bloom speaks to us about how vulnerability, suffering, and the release into joy, can combine as an ongoing, never-ending life practice. She mines her own experience while looking out into the world with awareness, empathy and the willingness to risk being wide open. These poems stand firm with readers.
Editor and poet Phil Hall's Introduction "To Lead by Crying" argues for a poetics of empathy.
Why has Ronna Bloom been drawn to hospitals?
Because the quick of experience abides at the inexpressible...
It is not clean, easy, or fancy to dwell on all this anguish. But a poetry that is willing to know pain, loss, and death may be able to give, if not cessation, at least company—by words.
[from Phil Hall’s Introduction to A Possible Trust: The Poetry of Ronna Bloom.]
In Ronna Bloom's Afterword, she traces the relevance of photography, psychotherapy, and meditation in her work. Defiant, comical, revealing, impolite yet respectful, A Possible Trust is a retrospective and celebration.
Who is your mercy contact?
published by Espresso-Chapbooks
On January 4, 2020, I realized I’d written a poem every day of the then new year, and decided to write a poem each day of 2020. What emerged and is highlighted here in this chapbook is chronicle as well as collection and is structured month by month. For me, the process was as much a spiritual practice as a writing practice. My intention was not only to generate poems but to keep the portal to awareness open every day. This meant deliberate attention to what became a year of fracturing and loss and a faithfulness to the flickering experience of now.
“This has to be one of the most breathtaking chapbooks I’ve ever read. I was just gasping over the final poems, so my husband said, “Something you want to read me?” I couldn’t stop: I read him most of the collection while my coffee cooled.”
— Angeline Janel Schellenberg, author of Tell Them It Was Mozart
The More
Ronna Bloom’s new poetry tests its music on the wards of a hospital. While circling a shadow theme of disappearance—retreating, giving out, giving up, being prone, down, waiting with death—Bloom is actually making poems that defend the opposite: tenderness as revelation, anger, strength, compassion as power, health! These poems are wide open. They do not turn away.
The More, by Ronna Bloom, published by Pedlar Press, Cover Art by Mark Rothko, Yellow over Purple, 1956.
The More was long-listed for The City of Toronto Book Awards 2018.
“Soulful, urgent, profound.”
“I think this is Bloom’s best collection yet. She actively engages with the world, saying things that I immediately want to write down to make mine.”
“Whether looking inward or outward, Bloom writes with directness, ringing clarity and a quiet wisdom. These are poems as luminous as the gorgeous Mark Rothko print that graces the book’s cover.”
“As an empathic observer, Bloom has captured feelings and associated impressions on the subject of mortality that are difficult to express, even for one experiencing them first-hand. This, along with the accessibility of her language, may lead some to consider her a Canadian contemporary People’s Poet, a kind of poet the country needs as much today as ever.”
Most things have no reason.
Why you leave a lover or join another, why you choose to stay where you live; these questions you may have no answer for. Or the answers change. Cloudy with a Fire in the Basement explores living from an awareness that has no reference points, that carries the risk of making no sense, of losing others who may require it, of understanding that there's no safety. The poems go toward these notions, even if the writer is fleeing.
Within Bloom's new poems exists an attempt toward freedom that demands looking at whatever the psyche revolts against or craves. By hawking an eye on human experience that has previously been rejected or desired--cruelty, love, grief, a good fitting pair of jeans, God—the poems investigate stuck places and too-tight habits. They skitter and rest, and lie down in the chaos and the quiet, in the overwhelming, tragic, sequinned world; and occasionally they alight in reality.
Use These Poems from Cloudy with a Fire in the Basement featured in short film by award-winning film-maker Midi Onodera.
Grief Without Fantasy from Cloudy with a Fire in the Basement featured in short film by award-winning film-maker Midi Onodera.
“The poems feel timeless and yet utterly contemporary. There are occasional references to the modern world – PINs, passwords, a radiator, Keith Haring, Tim Horton’s, Scrabble and Yoko Ono – but the poems are so much larger. While they are precisely crafted works about loss and fear, risk and relief, and about getting what you want, they are above all compassionate, comforting, and yes, godamnit, useful.”
Permiso
shortlisted for the pat lowther memorial award
What happens when, in mid-life, a marriage breaks apart and a woman's home empties of its familiar rituals, and energy patterns, and grids of faith and promise?
The poems in Ronna Bloom's fourth collection, Permiso, follow an ancient trajectory, of psychic displacement, of questions having to do with personal failure, of responsibility, yes, and of an emerging, craning desire, of a search, begun anew, for an Other who just might be Self
“Ronna Bloom’s fourth book of poetry is saturated with “permiso”: permission to feel, to pause, to grieve, to resent and crave change, to admit that your heart pounds sometimes at pretty, silly things....Bloom’s synthesis of contradictory passions into graceful poetics connects Permiso to writing by Adrienne Rich (Dark Fields of the Republic), Ann Carson (The Beauty of the Husband), Esta Spalding (The Wife’s Account).”
Public Works
shortlisted for the pat lowther memorial award
Public Works is poet Ronna Bloom's third collection of poetry.
In it, several themes emerge:
The private experience of the public (the idea that everything we experience—a book, a speech, a hospital, a religion, water running into the taps—we experience privately);
The public role of the poet (as in Ginsberg's lines: "While I'm here, I'll do the work/and what's the work?/To ease the pain of living"); and
The placement of the individual in a wider context (the places we find ourselves inhabiting: a body, a house, a job, a memory, as in the common phrase on maps in shopping malls: "You Are Here".)
Some poems address overlapping themes: physical location in a body, a street, a city; and recognition of one's own response to the institutions or services found there. Bloom is interested in the way individuals move back and forth between and within the public/private landscape.
These poems, moving through personal, physical and social realms, chart the uneven, uncertain trajectory of a life.
“Bloom’s poems convey a great tenderness and a painfully acute awareness of suffering in the world.”
Personal Effects
"These Personal Effects add up to a life, in all its clutter and grace, its fear and anger and desire. Bloom's voice is a torch, sending its searing, fearless light into the well of self. She knows the well is bottomless, and dangerous. She goes in anyway."
— Stephanie Bolster
“It is the intimacy of the poems that will connect with readers and this collection deserves a wide, not solely literary, audience.”
Fear of the Ride
SHORTLISTED FOR THE GERALD LAMPERT AWARD
"There is much life in Ronna Bloom's impressive first collection, Fear of the Ride; much to bless and mourn. This is a strong and original new voice, whether Bloom is speaking of the 'long longing' that loss produces, or of the heart's absurd demand, Bloom's command of rhetoric and cadence, her radical emotional honesty, and blunt, deep humour work to create a fearless and engaging poetry."
“It is the intimacy of the poems that will connect with readers and this collection deserves a wide, not solely literary, audience.”