Jody Gladding’s second full-length collection, Rooms and Their Airs, opens with the poem , “I’ve Sold My Parent’s House,” in which the speaker addresses the death of her parents beginning with the question, “where / do their napkin rings / belong” and ending with,
…. my grief
is that loose
flock I
hoard the shiny
debris
The transformation that takes place in this slim poem is haunting. Gladding’s work has a closely-crafted meditative quality, which carves quiet currents of emotion throughout her poetic landscape. This hint of restraint, which cleaves to the necessary while carefully and precisely interpreting her experiences, allows the natural world to speak for the speaker’s sense of loss—the “black / birds scatter gather / scatter again”—and like the black bird, that ubiquitous symbol of death, she hoards “the shiny / debris”—those napkin rings as tokens or as totems.
With personal narratives addressing sexuality, motherhood, and loss, Rooms and Their Airs is ultimately a book of exploration—of a curiosity fed by uniting the personal and environmental as one. Perhaps the title poem best embodies this, with lines like, “Air out the quilt. Down remembers / the wind,” and “Your thirst, / too, might be derived from grapes.” The slender poem “Sundial,” whose skinny shape resembles its title, reminds us of the passage of time, the connection between life and earth. In “Sundial,” the speaker confronts the death of her father, and the poem becomes a visual timeline, and a spindly tree:
My father
dead a year
is late
it seems
I wait
for him
to fall
like dead trees
But Gladding’s work is also a celebration of life. Woven through the book is a sequence of moon poems, which take their titles from Native American names for the months—among them are “Wolf Moon,” “Travel Moon,” “When Cold Moon,” and perhaps my favorite, “Beaver Moon”—“Beaver spreads her broad tail over the moon / all month she does this / she says work work.” The work of the beaver, like the poet, is methodically plowing forward, a celebration:
what’s left of the day’s
pure heartwood
beaver leaves it standing
little wonder
little spool of light—
This sequence of poems creates its own microcosm within the book, a world evolving with the seasons, life in flux.
It’s no wonder that Gladding is often compared to Lorine Niedecker, whose work similarly melds the personal and the natural with humor and quiet observation. We see Gladding’s humor in such poems as “Up Hunger”:
Instead I climbed a mountain today, so the poem
I didn’t write goes on too long and gets scrambly
near the top.
And although Gladding may share many of Niedecker’s strengths, she is very much her own poet—confidently navigating between words and worlds. In the third section of Rooms and Their Airs, Gladding includes a sequence, “Asparagus (Sparagus),” which plays on images from The Mediaeval Health Handbook in a series of plant-life persona poems that cement Gladding’s unique writing style. In “Tasteless Melons (Melones Insipidi)” she writes, “How pale and rough I must / seem to you, all ribs, a lifeless star.” And, in “Squash (Cucurbite)”:
Your stooped, lanky form is beautiful
to me, but we’ve agreed to nothing
yet. Consider that I stem—
and stem from—longing.
Gladding’s first book, Stone Crop, was published in 1993 as winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award. After much anticipation, Rooms and Their Airs was released this spring—a timely season for its publication as the book breathes both renewal and growth. It is a work that I find myself coming back to. Not long ago, I was able to hear Gladding read. Just before beginning, she darted outside to retrieve a poem she had etched into a large Vermont winter’s icicle from a snow bank where she had kept it frozen. Later, it would naturally dissolve and melt, but the poem remained in memory. Here, we have a lasting work, just as valuable.
