To Carve a Path Through Thickets

In what could be a motto for this book, Merryn Rutledge writes of "tuning beauty in measured ephemera." The tuned and beautiful, the measured-out and ephemeral, coexist here in poems both serious and playful, joyously celebrating the pleasures of daily life and unflinchingly bearing witness to the past and the present moment. Rutledge movingly reveals how political, spiritual, delightful, and devastating each moment of life is. She carves a clear and glorious path through the revelatory pleasures of the ordinary (a grocery cashier who "solemnly nods and blesses the water / three times with his scanner") and the extremities of grief and world-wounding acts of history. Rutledge demonstrates how well she knows what she calls "the art of seeing."

-Bruce Beasley, author, Prayershreds and other books

Readers of this collection take journeys both geographic and emotional, camping in the Ozark Mountains, strolling in Britanny, and visiting a grocery store. We find revelations about grief and its attendant grace, as well as gratitude for the gifts of agency claimed, the self understood, and the sacramental quotidian. "Retroflection" embodies the collection's title as the speaker blazes through thickets of self-recrimination to self-understanding. From the "fire-lit soul" of a father finding his calling, to the grandchild who sees his grandmother as "sturdy and always," we track the poet's path, as Stephen Dunn has written, on the trail of "things we half-know," but which poetry helps us reckon.

-Miriam O'Neal, Poet Laureate of Plymouth, MA and author, Half-Said Things

"I take a walk to find what is bigger" is Merryn Rutledge's ars poetica. Confronted with the riddles of time and the recognition of death, she does not define what we cannot know but rather takes us along on her search. Her sense of humor is evident when, expecting enchantment or mercy, she instead finds a weed having "the orneriness / to go everywhere, as love does, / by runner and root, blown and falling seed." When have desire and love been described as "ornery"? These poems are inventive, serious, and wacky, and show us how to keep going.

-Joyce Wilson, author, Take and Receive and The Need for a Bridge