Book Review

Pam Rehm’s seventh collection and her first with Wave Books, Inner Verses, gifts the reader with luminous lyric poetry whose probing speaker ranges across inner and outer landscapes in search of what persistent vision might, through gentle attention, render. At forty-seven pages, this slim collection is a rich result of its ephemeral precision.

In a 2015 interview, Rehm told Colorado Review, citing Emily Dickinson as an influence, “I am . . . always thinking about how doubt transforms itself into belief or how belief changes into doubt. I don’t have a set of beliefs; searching, walking, I am always trying to uncover something that feels true.” These obsessions and approaches are all at work, and fruitfully so, in Inner Verses. In the book’s opening poem, “Confirmation,” Rehm writes:

I have lived as of late
unpracticed

My faith essentially
eroded

I am possessed now
with duration

Erosion and duration may seem at first to be in conflict with one another, but Rehm’s newest poems are able to achieve both an erosion of language and a duration of attention here, perhaps one through the other. The rest of Inner Verses follows as a practice of both, in and of itself a search for what feels true in poetics as in living.

The book can be read as a walk alongside the speaker through this practice as well as through New York City’s quieter reaches. As such, the whole book feels as though it could have been written—and should rightly be read—at or just before dawn. While Rehm has lived in America’s most populous city for a long time, her eye lands repeatedly on the natural landscape. The first line of Inner Verses begins with “wild birds.” Reading Rehm as an urban ecopoet worthily broadens understandings of contemporary ecopoetry as well as the American naturalist pursuit. Why should the city be any less worthy a place for the divine to appear through the wildness that lasts and outlasts it? Other images wilding the book are fallen leaves turning to soil, grassy paths, goslings, pigeons, gulls, “trees / of birdsong,” moss, “the waters of the Hudson,” rainwater puddles, a “caterpillar’s / pupal sleep,” and “snow at twilight.” Neither does Rehm neglect her city home. In “Internal Disquiet,” she writes:

Lingering over the sunrise or garbage left at low tide,
I am crushed by this vigilance.
Always crushed by the salutary effects of the
intimate fragileness of this world.

The sunrise and the garbage alike evince the world’s fragileness and equally require the poet’s vigilant vision. To overlook the garbage would be to risk the entire ecopoetic project. The return to the violent verb “crushed” pulls the reader’s wincing body into the setting of the poem. Throughout Inner Verses, the speaker reckons with what such vigilant vision requires.

In the aforementioned interview, Rehm also admitted she is a slow writer and reader, fixating on individual words and what they might become given time and attention. This fixation is what lends such richness to Rehm’s short lines and constrained imagery. The reader slows to match her gait and poetic pace. In “A Construction,” which has been dedicated to poet Keith Waldrop, the speaker self-referentially quiets:

The poet is transfixed by
what is not

apparent
Beneath notice

How to see what is beneath one’s notice, beneath sight? How to see the truth of what is, except slowly, and in miniscule increments, all around?

As Inner Verses progresses, the speaker repeatedly envisages the revelations and limitations of the aging body. In a longer, serial poem, the collection’s penultimate, “Bowing to Forces Infinitely Greater,” Rehm writes:

There is no answer
that doesn’t come

as a cost
to the body

Any answers worth comprehending require living, and thus a dedication to living’s persistent cost. Earlier, in “The Small Gate,” Rehm writes similarly, “The body is a conduit // And grace / its divine distillation.” Throughout the book, the poet’s work is to distill what is perceived in the same way that the divine is encountered through an accrual of distilled moments past, or else a flash of new experience that feels, somehow, to be a distilled version of itself already.

Distillation harkens back to the erosion with which Rehm began her new collection, except that it was an erosion of faith that—by the book’s end—has eroded even further to divine distillation, which is to say, grace. As early twentieth-century French thinker Simone Weil wrote in Gravity and Grace, “Grace . . . can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.” Here Rehm has done the miraculous work of building line by line the very void through which such grace might enter. In Inner Verses, Rehm has achieved another quietly revelatory book, which has become her signature.