Book Review

What this book cares about most:

• Rodeo embeds the grief over the stillbirth of Wilkinson’s son into a western landscape of pasturelands, canyons, and the Great Salt Lake in Utah. The immeasurable changes wrought by grief shift Wilkinson’s relationships—with her husband and sons, the people she encounters, and her daily chores and habits.
• Rodeo attempts to understand this new terrain through intimately wrought moments of everyday life from making jam and canning tomatoes to camping on a rainy night and hearing rodeo announcers calling down the block.

Poems that moved me:

• “Rodeo”
• “Ghost”
• “Canning Tomatoes, Late August”
• “Conversations with the Dead”
• “Buddha Has Returned”
• “Teapot Lake on the Head of a Pin”

Lines that lingered:

• “Sometimes a child dies, / and living things are ugly. / A scavenger begs, / and in his ugliness, / we see ourselves.”
• “. . . to telegraph / my graphic grief, // let it stay in that space / we call space // where I can’t touch it / or take it back.”
• “Sometimes it feels good / to let the world pass you by, // to open your door, / and there’s nothing but sky.”
• “Chasing the bull, his horns / big as myth, / his hooves / making music / is called riding a poem.”
• “Ask me who I’ll be / tomorrow. Ask me if I love / the world. The watch the oar // endlessly break / through a darkness / it cannot change.”
• “Thank it— / what eats your heart / into grave simplicity . . .”

Figurative language and formal feats:

• Wilkinson has an adroit eye for descriptive detail that, through unexpected imagery and word choice, makes simple tasks, moments, thoughts, and ideas new.
• Regardless of form, the poems in Rodeo capture portraits of the common place with deep attention and care. Wilkinson creates free verse, sonnets, sestinas, odes, and elegies that can each take on the immediacy of a still life painting—a subtle and gut-wrenching undercurrent to a collection ordered around significant loss.

This book is in conversation with:

• The plain-spoken focus of Ted Kooser and Mary Oliver.
• John McCarthy’s centrality of place as a character.
• The questing of Francesca Bell.

Questions this book made me ask:

• How does experiencing grief expose the strangeness and mystery of life, and how does one cope with these new revelations?
• How are thoughts of those we have lost akin to their presence?
• What role does the natural world have in healing the wounded heart?

Who I would give this book to:

• People newly drawn to poetry for solace and comfort.
• Writers and readers interested in form.
• Anyone seeking a voice honoring the expansive West.