The poems in Linda Aldrich’s new book Ballast are stunning and vital. She describes the cardinal’s color as pulsing in the darkness, and these poems acknowledge the dark, but stand bright against all that would break us. Aldrich is beautifully agile with form, whether that form is traditional or wildly inventive, as in her crown of sonnets coupled with their own erasures. These poems bring us heartbreak and longing, but also sly humor and levity, a bench that flies, books with lives of their own, buttons tossed into the toll basket instead of coins.
Another pleasure of this book is an astute and surprising exploration of history, from Puritan New England to 1980s San Francisco, as well as the poet’s own quirky and moving family stories. The language and feeling here are rich and sure, doing the crucial work of imagination, that is, creating a ground for attention and empathy, the embrace of our shared humanity. —Betsy Sholl, author of House of Sparrows
This third book of poems from Portland, Maine’s current Poet Laureate is the gift of an artist at the height of her powers. A deep feeling and deep thinking poet, Linda Aldrich offers up luminous poems of awakenings over the many stages of a life: the confusions of childhood and also its sudden joys, as when effort is recognized by a beloved teacher; the thrill of living as a student abroad, being addressed by the musical mademoiselle upon entering a Paris patisserie.
A crown of sonnets and corresponding erasure poems vividly capture the self-discovery and angst of a young woman living and working in San Francisco’s theatre community as the city is ravaged by AIDS. Upon discovering that her “twelfth great-grandmother” was hanged as a heretic, the poet fearlessly delves into the imagined heart and mind of her 17th century forebear and the harsh world around her. Later poems radiate with the contentments of a mature, loving marriage. Like the “vigilant spider” she observes in her writer’s studio, “she assumes fragility/in a world where threads loosen, ties break.” Aldrich knows well the challenge of trying to stay on balance when life conspires to unbalance us. Her finely wrought poems are indeed Ballast readers will turn to again and again—for inspiration, consolation, and with gratitude.
—Marcia F. Brown, author of In the Afternoon
The often watery world of Linda Aldrich’s collection Ballast opens with “In the Well of a Wave off Kanagawa,” a prologue poem in response to a Hokusai print. From the poem’s first line, “In the same boat with Hokusai,” we are in the beautiful, precarious struggle of the world. This poem’s ballast is Mt. Fuji, “like a rope thrown to us.” For those at the mercy of the wave—all of us—”Our boat steadies,” the poet writes. And so we are launched into poems full of ships, the sea and its pull, harbor cities and more: the ocean that life is.
Aboard this seagoing vessel of poems, the Ballast of the title is quarried granite. The cargo includes history, from the early and later days of this country, the paradox of family, inheritance, the awe and wonder of the natural world, love in its complexities, theater, visual art, mortality, and more. But the book’s true ballast is the poet’s sensibility—her voice and vision. In the ship’s hold is a trunk from which an intricately woven fabric of vibrant colors is lifted and unfolded.
This collection offers us the ballast that poetry is, and the poet does not look away. Aldrich’s words are exquisitely chosen, brave, honest, fearless. This book is a place come to.
—Veronica Patterson, author of Sudden White Fan
Ballast
“Linda Aldrich explores movingly ‘that flawed space,’ to borrow a phrase from Eavan Boland, that can come between the words ‘woman’ and ‘poet.’ The poems in March and Mad Women confront and honor, marvel and puzzle over the ways of women leading ordinary lives. ‘I do the things I need to do,’ says the speaker in the collection's opening poem....When I came to the description of just-baked bread loaves arranged on the counter ‘like Conestoga wagons / without wheels, going nowhere,’ when I felt the exquisite sadness and beauty of their lingering there amid Linda Aldrich's lovely and intelligent poems, I wanted and needed nothing else.”—Nancy Eimers
“This collection adheres like the layered movement of surf, offering all at once the deep and sometimes scarcely palpable undertow of grief from the loss of a mother, the tidal rhythms of weather and the natural world, and poems that spin away from these themes to touch upon bits of others’ lives, other layers of the speaker’s life, other forms and other voices; these poems ripple through the collection like the small, self-contained waves that add light and variation to water’s surface. To sit with this book is to relax into the turbulent and ultimately soothing flow of a deeply observed life—one rendered with a fine combination of restraint and generosity.” —Leslie Ullman
"These innovative poems enter a necessary strangeness when they reach the edges of silence and mystery. In one of the book’s threads, the poet explores the complicated loss of her mother in poems that are both haunting and radiant….The poet’s voice is passionate, musical, particular, and, finally, fearless. By the time the reader encounters the line “I am ready now to take my place” (“Pantoum to Heal”), the poems and the poet are already rooted deep in the reader’s imagination."
—Veronica Patterson
March and Mad Women
"These are poems of splendid lyrical delicacy and canny narrative movement, and they address our sorrows with unflappable brio. Foothold is a debut of real distinction."
—David Wojahn
"In poems so precisely beautiful they seem effortless, Aldrich articulates loneliness and sadness alongside joy and communion."
—Natasha Saje
Foothold