Martha Ronk, _Why/Why Not_

THE COVER OF Why/Why Not includes a photo of a room's interior wall, upon which a mirror has been obliquely placed, reflecting another wall of the same room. The effect is of a parallelogram-sized section of one image affixed atop the surface of another, different-but-related image. The photo acts as a visual clue to the technique of the poems inside. They are self-interrupting, frequently starting down one track only to jump to another -- or is it simply another section of the same track?

The man with the mistaken hair

has been remembering what I remember but he thinks

are intrusive except ones I can't stand.

("Odi et amo 2")

We get this effect most often in the earlier poems in the book, with their longer, sparingly-punctuated lines, unscrolling their way down the page without ever quite allowing us to determine whether they should be read as end-stopped or enjambed:

Unable to keep the spill from spilling over from concentration

to concentration the way a voice merges with a voice on tv

And I shouldn't have left the house never have left the house

weeks afterward the fallout the spinout she stopped dead

in your tracks without cause without a car on the road [...].

("Unable to keep the spill from spilling")

But then, in the last of the book's three sections, we have two longer poems -- "why" and "why not" -- or perhaps they are one poem? -- and "why not" is composed almost entirely in short, firmly end-stopped lines:

I don't want to know.

Anyhow I don't mind it.

What is predictable all the time and the cold.

Then backing and backing and backing.

What I said was I don't mind it

and I believed it when I said it.

(p. 76)

This leaves us with the feeling that something has happened. We don't know what it is -- whatever it is, it feels more resigned than reconciled, more a loss than a recovery, but somehow wiser and clearer. And it has something to do with Hamlet. At midpoint in the volume we have a section titled "act 3," in which the perceptions of Hamlet, Gertrude, and Ophelia orbit something unnamed and frightening, sometimes in the long, unscrolling lines of the first part of the book, sometimes in the abrupt end-stopped phrases of "why not."

A memorably unsettling book.