Review of Ruth Roach Pierson\u27s Realignment

Harding-Russell, Gillian

English

Wilfrid Laurier University

The GooseVolume 14No. 2 Tenth Anniversary Issue Article 22-29-2016Realignment by Ruth Roach PiersonGillian Harding-RussellUniversity of SaskatchewanPart of the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Literature in English, North AmericaCommons, Nature and Society Relations Commons, and the Place and Environment CommonsFollow this and additional works at / Suivez-nous ainsi que d’autres travaux et œuvres:https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegooseThis article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Goose by anauthorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.Cet article vous est accessible gratuitement et en libre accès grâce à Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Le texte a été approuvé pour faire partie intégrantede la revue The Goose par un rédacteur autorisé de Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Pour de plus amples informations, contactezscholarscommons@wlu.ca.Recommended Citation / Citation recommandéeHarding-Russell, Gillian. "Realignment by Ruth Roach Pierson." The Goose, vol. 14 , no. 2 , article 2, 2016,https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol14/iss2/2.  Adjustments and Middle Age Realignment by RUTH ROACH PIERSON Palimpsest Press, 2015 $18.95 Reviewed by GILLIAN HARDING-RUSSELL In Realignment, Ruth Roach Pierson writes poems that speak about middle-aged adjustments, a self-questioning about self-critical habits and doldrums. Although these poems breathe the air of living rooms with pianos, draw inspiration from film and painting, nature is uncovered at a base layer of the poet's experience and simple joy or sorrow.  In the title poem, which unusually (for a title poem) appears first in the collection, the poet depicts a piano stool whose function has changed over the years from a stool on which she practised Czerny exercises before a "second-hand upright" to its present use as plant stand or extra stool for guests:    Spiralling up, the piano stool dissolves  into my pillow, transition as seamless   as a practised cinematic fade-out  fade-in, done in black and white (13)  Very smoothly the image of the cultivated yet domestic piano stool becomes a metonymy in the poems that follow for the adjustments that the poet has had to make over the years.  Along with these modifications that have come about, self-examination becomes a common theme in this collection, and no more so than in the second poem "Not fog or Wasteland." Here the poet tries out a comparison between her shadow self (marking an insufficient self rather than an alter ego) to a "fog or wasteland" (connoting uncertainty on a gradient with depression), but finds the analogy itself lacking. "What name should I give you, you/ who have shadowed me all my life," she asks this "shadow of self," then summons the word "shadow" in various languages, including the Latin  "umbra," the French "ombre" and the German "shatten." "Does Language matter" she quips, unable to resist an erudite pun on "matter" and the Latin mater. Retrospectively she looks back on an earlier also neurotic but perhaps not so self-aware self, whom she sees in terms of a rainforest that is not quite glorified since the trees are "necklaced in clammy moss":   Once I named you rainforest, picturing   trees necklaced in clammy  moss.  Once I named you "it" --  a preposition  without antecedent, un-  signified . . . (14)  Pierson's wordplay and careful nuancing of meanings as she toys with language and connotation in the first etiolated stanza of the poem with its decrescendo of lines that reads like a prayer, and the further reification of that self as alternatively a "rainforest" or "it" (the latter reminiscent of the Jungian ID but removed from its association with libido?) extends the meditation into a realm simultaneously more concrete than language (in the case of the landscape tableau) and perhaps more abstract (the psychological "it").  In "Yakima Apples," Pierson's finely chiselled triplets start with one homely proposition—the scent of apples baking in a wood stove and caramel apples at the Puyallup fair—and then wander in their 1Harding-Russell: RealignmentPublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2016  association with apples into a yet more folksy realm:   The Johnny seeds scattered,  patents bought, genes modified  local varieties disappearing  the suspicious wax of green sheen  on Granny Smiths. (15)  From Edenic version, the "apple" here takes a journey into a more contemporary, commercial variety of apple that may not always appear as it seems. As a last reminder, the postwar child who holds the apple by the stem and eats the fruit to the core reinforces a guilt that the poet seems to share almost constitutionally.  On a more personal note, Pierson in "Gains and Losses" speaks about her aging parents, fears her failures in memory in consideration of her family history and her mother's Alzheimer's diagnosis. With admiration for her father, she recalls how he, diagnosed with bone cancer, insisted on "bundling his Alzheimer's-addled wife/ out of the retirement home's infirmary" so that he could drive her around the neighbourhoods where they had lived during happier times:   So he could drive her one last time  to the neighbourhood to view both  the house  they lived in for over thirty years, and the new one  they later built on the land where an apricot tree  once bloomed every spring. (24)   As quite frequently in Pierson's verse, a return to nature marks a base of sanity and delight and escape from the abstractions of mind and anxiety.  A variation on this touch base of sanity associated with nature occurs in "In Memory of Jenny Morrison." Here, the poem begins with the speaker relishing the beautiful colours and textures in nature—the leaves "turning ginger, marigold and kidney bean"—when she comes across an accident in which a pregnant woman on a bicycle has been killed in a traffic accident (72). As the speaker views the police cars and corpse under the tarp, she finds herself horrified at her own unthinking pleasure in having walked through the leaves on her way home:   later mortified  the effrontery of my feet  stomping through fallen leaves,  my pleasure in their brittle   scrunch and rustle. (73)  In this poem, again, the self-punishing speaker is evident, but here more ironically her joy and self-censure are directed at the nature that allows her stability elsewhere in the collection.   A review of Pierson's Realignment would not be complete without mention of ekphrasis as it is applied to paintings, videos and films. In "'A Woman's Crowning Glory'/ John William Waterhouse's Eulalia," Pierson notes the female saint's white dove flying from her mouth on her execution when an unseasonable snow arrives:   A crowd gathers on steps that lead  to the site of the execution— woman  on her knees, head uncovered in mourning,  a young boy pointing excitedly at  an airborne dove . . . (66)  2The Goose, Vol. 14, No. 2 [2016], Art. 2https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol14/iss2/2  The dove motif, introduced at the beginning of the poem, reappears during the final stanza with the three doves (reminiscent of the holy trinity) taking flight above the bystanders amid the "clutter of pigeons" and "indifferent" "spear-bearing legionnaires." As so often in Pierson's work, nature—here in the form of the dove as a bird of nature as well as in its role as a traditional typos for peace—becomes associated with redemption. Altogether, Realignment is a subtle work—though fairly traditional in its tastes and fondness for nature and art—held together by the conscience-driven voice of a speaker whose periodic glimpses into nature seem to provide momentary relief to her soul.  GILLIAN HARDING-RUSSELL received her PhD from the University of Saskatchewan and has taught as a sessional at both the University of Saskatchewan and the University of Regina. She was poetry editor for Event between 1987-2005. At present she is Reading Manuscript poetry editor for Event and a freelance writer more widely. She has three poetry collections and several chapbooks published. A chapbook Fox Love is coming out with Alfred Gustav Press in 2017.          3Harding-Russell: RealignmentPublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2016

Realignment by Ruth Roach Pierson

Scholars Commons

The Goose
Volume 14
No. 2 Tenth Anniversary Issue Article 2
2-29-2016
Realignment by Ruth Roach Pierson
Gillian Harding-Russell
University of Saskatchewan
Part of the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Literature in English, North America
Commons, Nature and Society Relations Commons, and the Place and Environment Commons
Follow this and additional works at / Suivez-nous ainsi que d’autres travaux et œuvres:
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose
This article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Goose by an
authorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.
Cet article vous est accessible gratuitement et en libre accès grâce à Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Le texte a été approuvé pour faire partie intégrante
de la revue The Goose par un rédacteur autorisé de Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Pour de plus amples informations, contactez
scholarscommons@wlu.ca.
Recommended Citation / Citation recommandée
Harding-Russell, Gillian. "Realignment by Ruth Roach Pierson." The Goose, vol. 14 , no. 2 , article 2, 2016,
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol14/iss2/2.
 
 
Adjustments and Middle Age 
Realignment by RUTH ROACH PIERSON 
Palimpsest Press, 2015 $18.95 
Reviewed by GILLIAN HARDING-RUSSELL 
In Realignment, Ruth Roach Pierson writes 
poems that speak about middle-aged 
adjustments, a self-questioning about self-
critical habits and doldrums. Although these 
poems breathe the air of living rooms with 
pianos, draw inspiration from film and 
painting, nature is uncovered at a base layer 
of the poet's experience and simple joy or 
sorrow. 
 In the title poem, which unusually 
(for a title poem) appears first in the 
collection, the poet depicts a piano stool 
whose function has changed over the years 
from a stool on which she practised Czerny 
exercises before a "second-hand upright" to 
its present use as plant stand or extra stool 
for guests: 
  
 Spiralling up, the piano stool 
dissolves 
 into my pillow, transition as 
seamless  
 as a practised cinematic fade-out 
 fade-in, done in black and white (13) 
 
Very smoothly the image of the cultivated 
yet domestic piano stool becomes a 
metonymy in the poems that follow for the 
adjustments that the poet has had to make 
over the years. 
 Along with these modifications that 
have come about, self-examination 
becomes a common theme in this 
collection, and no more so than in the 
second poem "Not fog or Wasteland." Here 
the poet tries out a comparison between 
her shadow self (marking an insufficient self 
rather than an alter ego) to a "fog or 
wasteland" (connoting uncertainty on a 
gradient with depression), but finds the 
analogy itself lacking. "What name should I 
give you, you/ who have shadowed me all 
my life," she asks this "shadow of self," then 
summons the word "shadow" in various 
languages, including the Latin  "umbra," the 
French "ombre" and the German "shatten." 
"Does Language matter" she quips, unable 
to resist an erudite pun on "matter" and the 
Latin mater. Retrospectively she looks back 
on an earlier also neurotic but perhaps not 
so self-aware self, whom she sees in terms 
of a rainforest that is not quite glorified 
since the trees are "necklaced in clammy 
moss": 
 
 Once I named you rainforest, 
picturing  
 trees necklaced in clammy  moss. 
 Once I named you "it" --  a 
preposition 
 without antecedent, un- 
 signified . . . (14) 
 
Pierson's wordplay and careful nuancing of 
meanings as she toys with language and 
connotation in the first etiolated stanza of 
the poem with its decrescendo of lines that 
reads like a prayer, and the further 
reification of that self as alternatively a 
"rainforest" or "it" (the latter reminiscent of 
the Jungian ID but removed from its 
association with libido?) extends the 
meditation into a realm simultaneously 
more concrete than language (in the case of 
the landscape tableau) and perhaps more 
abstract (the psychological "it"). 
 In "Yakima Apples," Pierson's finely 
chiselled triplets start with one homely 
proposition—the scent of apples baking in a 
wood stove and caramel apples at the 
Puyallup fair—and then wander in their 
1
Harding-Russell: Realignment
Published by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2016
 
 
association with apples into a yet more 
folksy realm: 
 
 The Johnny seeds scattered, 
 patents bought, genes modified 
 local varieties disappearing 
 the suspicious wax of green sheen 
 on Granny Smiths. (15) 
 
From Edenic version, the "apple" here takes 
a journey into a more contemporary, 
commercial variety of apple that may not 
always appear as it seems. As a last 
reminder, the postwar child who holds the 
apple by the stem and eats the fruit to the 
core reinforces a guilt that the poet seems 
to share almost constitutionally. 
 On a more personal note, Pierson in 
"Gains and Losses" speaks about her aging 
parents, fears her failures in memory in 
consideration of her family history and her 
mother's Alzheimer's diagnosis. With 
admiration for her father, she recalls how 
he, diagnosed with bone cancer, insisted on 
"bundling his Alzheimer's-addled wife/ out 
of the retirement home's infirmary" so that 
he could drive her around the 
neighbourhoods where they had lived 
during happier times: 
 
 So he could drive her one last time 
 to the neighbourhood to view both  
the house 
 they lived in for over thirty years, 
and the new one 
 they later built on the land where an 
apricot tree 
 once bloomed every spring. (24) 
 
 As quite frequently in Pierson's 
verse, a return to nature marks a base of 
sanity and delight and escape from the 
abstractions of mind and anxiety. 
 A variation on this touch base of 
sanity associated with nature occurs in "In 
Memory of Jenny Morrison." Here, the 
poem begins with the speaker relishing the 
beautiful colours and textures in nature—
the leaves "turning ginger, marigold and 
kidney bean"—when she comes across an 
accident in which a pregnant woman on a 
bicycle has been killed in a traffic accident 
(72). As the speaker views the police cars 
and corpse under the tarp, she finds herself 
horrified at her own unthinking pleasure in 
having walked through the leaves on her 
way home: 
 
 later mortified 
 the effrontery of my feet 
 stomping through fallen leaves, 
 my pleasure in their brittle  
 scrunch and rustle. (73) 
 
In this poem, again, the self-punishing 
speaker is evident, but here more ironically 
her joy and self-censure are directed at the 
nature that allows her stability elsewhere in 
the collection.  
 A review of Pierson's Realignment 
would not be complete without mention of 
ekphrasis as it is applied to paintings, videos 
and films. In "'A Woman's Crowning Glory'/ 
John William Waterhouse's Eulalia," Pierson 
notes the female saint's white dove flying 
from her mouth on her execution when an 
unseasonable snow arrives: 
 
 A crowd gathers on steps that lead 
 to the site of the execution— 
woman 
 on her knees, head uncovered in 
mourning, 
 a young boy pointing excitedly at  an 
airborne dove . . . (66) 
 
2
The Goose, Vol. 14, No. 2 [2016], Art. 2
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol14/iss2/2
 
 
The dove motif, introduced at the beginning 
of the poem, reappears during the final 
stanza with the three doves (reminiscent of 
the holy trinity) taking flight above the 
bystanders amid the "clutter of pigeons" 
and "indifferent" "spear-bearing 
legionnaires." As so often in Pierson's work, 
nature—here in the form of the dove as a 
bird of nature as well as in its role as a 
traditional typos for peace—becomes 
associated with redemption. Altogether, 
Realignment is a subtle work—though fairly 
traditional in its tastes and fondness for 
nature and art—held together by the 
conscience-driven voice of a speaker whose 
periodic glimpses into nature seem to 
provide momentary relief to her soul. 
 
GILLIAN HARDING-RUSSELL received her 
PhD from the University of Saskatchewan 
and has taught as a sessional at both the 
University of Saskatchewan and the 
University of Regina. She was poetry editor 
for Event between 1987-2005. At present 
she is Reading Manuscript poetry editor for 
Event and a freelance writer more widely. 
She has three poetry collections and several 
chapbooks published. A chapbook Fox Love 
is coming out with Alfred Gustav Press in 
2017. 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
3
Harding-Russell: Realignment
Published by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2016


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Realignment by Ruth Roach Pierson

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