Erica Goss
Landscape with Womb and Paradox
Broadstone Books
Reviewer: Rebecca Patrascu
Erica Goss has spent decades honing her craft, and her new book, Landscape with Womb and Paradox, is a deft and perceptive gallery of landscapes, portraits, and vignettes that explore environmental and familial influences. The collection, long-awaited by those familiar with the poet, is so consistently solid, it is difficult not to quote each page as an example of her skill.
The first poem provides the book’s title and introduces a theme of loss, opening with the lines, “On a black sand beach / I lost my virginity.” Other physical and psychic losses follow. Loved ones are lost to mental illness and death, wildfires raze the landscape, bird nests are abandoned. Sleep is lost, and dreams, and homes. There are self-imposed losses as well. In “The Distance Between Us,” a kindergartner runs away and becomes “instantly, / hopelessly lost,” and “Verloren” explores the impulse to disappear and the bittersweet pain of being missed. Through listed declarations, “At Eleven” and “Brooks Avenue Notebook” present compelling montages of a curtailed childhood:
I tell my brother we bought him at the dime store.
I hear the electric piano for the first time and fall in love.
The dryer breaks. The washing machine breaks.
The clothesline holding our underwear breaks.
Rain hits the roof like pennies from space.
The poems in this collection as a whole work as these assembled lines do, providing the framework for a complex lyrical construction. There is a quiet authority in Goss’s voice, and her poetry is rich with euphony, making lines like these from “What to Do with an Empty Nest” a pleasure to read aloud:
Imagine it bursting with tiny open mouths
amber-edged / bottomless / waiting for a fat caterpillar
derricked from parent’s beak
Stroke its raveling edges / architecture of wind & flight
read love, read terror / hearts beating
a secret message meant only for me
Goss’s insightful metaphors are another of the book’s strengths. In one poem, a wrecked car acts as a memento mori: “how beautifully / the pebbles of safety glass / glimmered, like scattered pearls.” In another, an engine starting “sounds like a wad / of paper bursting into flame.” Concrete images support abstract themes like impermanence, as in “Smoke,” in which, “Churches, houses, schools, // are nothing more than / smoke, reorganized.”
Long shadows reach into poems about family. We read of a mother and grandfather who suffered deprivations in WWII Germany, a father whose absence is itself a presence, a lost newborn daughter, a son with mental health struggles, and a Lucky-Strikes-smoking grandmother who sleeps with scorpions in the Mojave Desert. While Goss’s mother learned as a child in the war to “take tiny bites” (“Hunger”), “A Life in Reverse” rewinds through her father’s speeding tickets, stolen cars, and crashes. When as a child Goss asked him why seawater in cupped hands isn’t blue, his answer is telling: “It’s just a trick, he said, / as his face rearranged itself / a trick of the light.” The man himself is a sort of optical illusion: appearing, disappearing, then ultimately reappearing in a “thumb-sized jar” of ashes on the passenger seat of a car in “The State of Jefferson.”
Rather than melancholy, the family poems in Landscape with Womb and Paradox are characterized by compassionate inquiry. Epigenetics becomes a gateway into self-assessment, as in “Living Like This,” which opens: “I was born hungry, impure, my war-DNA a little anxiety factory, / my feet arched for a childhood of tiptoeing around my father.”
Goss’s voice is confident and direct, and her investigations astute, but she does not presume to have all the answers, and her humility allows room for us to recognize ourselves in her work. The same poem concludes:
maybe I have thirty more years, maybe forty to fix this mess,
maybe by then I will learn to trust grief, or maybe
I’ll do nothing and just keep living like this.
Goss is as a generous in her writing as in her life. The former Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, she promotes poetry through in-person events and media, leads classes and workshops for students of all ages, writes a blog, publishes a newsletter, and has launched two art-education programs for teen girls. She has also reviewed more than a hundred books, making her especially practiced at sharing the insights that come from paying close attention.
Goss turns her focus toward environmental and humanitarian concerns in the last third of her book. “Grass, the Conqueror” is a playful ode, with lines such as, “This grass moves into the neighborhood, / puts down roots, and stands up for itself;” while “Zero Hour” is a paean to trees expressed via a catalog of shrewd observations. “A tree is a variation on the line,” Goss writes, and “a tree is site-specific,” concluding: “a tree will never lie to you / lets you cut it / drive a car through it / carve a den in it / climb inside.”
“Object Lesson” pans from a tattooed man cradling an egg carton to the televised image of children “crouched in cages / like factory chickens.” The prose poem “telegenic” shows the harrowing impact of war on children and suggests complicity in the averted gaze: “Explosions branch through the ear and jaw but quiet, please, this game requires the world’s silence.”
The final poem of the Landscape with Womb and Paradox is a door that leads into both the poet’s past and future. In “Portal” she writes:
My body was an ear, bone & hair & nerve. I could turn
any sound into salt wind, waves, and seagull cries
under a dense, florid sky, a thousand miles from shore.
Goss adds in the last stanza, “I am not through with believing,” and we can be grateful if that is the case. Because by believing in her own vision, Goss offers us a book that does what art does best, building connections and deepening our understanding of the world. The poet’s capacity for belief, and her ability to perceive and describe her history, prompts us to take note and mark for ourselves, in all their complexity and swiftness, the moments that matter most.
