Heartbroke and Lucky.
Jane Terrell. YellowJacket Press: Tampa, Florida, 2019.
This collection shows how travel can heal the heart. But these poems also embrace heartbreak in a way that powerfully resonates.
In the book’s opening poem “My Only Husband” the loss is made clear, for “He’s a / conch shell, a straw hat, a rose bush, a candle flame.” And in this instance, as he heads on his own journey “trying to describe his world and [how] it’s / not working” the narrator appears to anticipate upcoming journeys, as she states, “We gather around him on a piazza overlooking the sea.”
From there, two poems later, the reader is transported to “parting rushes in the placid Okavango.” The poet asserts “That you laid the path to this smooth passage— / . . . [to] waters under the insistent African sun, / the percussive Setswana tongue, the soft / afternoon on Mmadi Khudu Island.” The gateway to a long journey across the globe opens before us as the collection’s pages unfold.
Soon we are back in the land of piazzas and “the café at Castel Sant’ Angelo.” Here, in “It’s a Lonely Hallelujah,” lines capture both the exhilaration of solo travel but, especially given the circumstances, the loneliness of it. The narrator states “When you’ve never met lonely, you cherish alone—when / the silent house is yours and you meet yourself again.” However, after loss, the connection with a farmer “on the mountain / in Mondragone” that includes a conversation that spans “from Brigand music of the 1850 war against unification / to lizard typologies,” becomes lackluster. What should be a wonderful moment, the poem notes, becomes an instance when “lonely lingers near.”
These pieces often combine the book’s major themes and mix cultural perspectives as well. In “Rose Petals” the ideals of the 19th century Persian religious leader Baháʼu’lláh are interlaced with images from England’s Mendip Hills. As the poem begins “on a lane hidden in hedgerows, then a forest / trail, on a sunny, chill day in May to visit the stone / tower rising from Cranmore Wood,” the lines drift a few stanzas later to philosophy and religion, “a journey to greater unity, toward Baháʼu’lláh’s vision / of oneness. All this intertwines with a conversation covering everything from the poet Táhirih to the soul’s “eternal journey toward perfection,” additionally winding it ways through the contrapuntal narrative of a medieval maiden’s travels. The reader traverses great distances in just a few lines.
Terrell offers so much grace and beauty in this collection, all of it spanning from inner spaces to regions across the planet and all of it coming together in these line’s complex tapestry. This mingling is the medicine that will heal, as in “Damaraland,” set in the Namibian desert, where all creatures seek “easier water under the sand / of the ephemeral Ugab River / . . . allow[ing] them / to amble, unharmed, / through the mopane trees.”
–Michael Trammell