Poetry review – THE DENSITY OF COMPACT BONE : Charles Rammelkamp accompanies Magdalena Ball on a poetic exploration of the nature of time
The Density of Compact Bone
Magdalena Ball
Ginninderra Press, 2021
ISBN: 978-1761091865
102 pp $16.99
Magdalena Ball’s overriding theme in The Density of Compact Bone is time. What is it? How does it work? What are its effects? Is it even real? Over and over again, contemplating the world, she runs into the conundrum of time, “time’s honey,” as she refers to it in the poem “soul clap”: sweet and sticky, trapping language and perception in its gummy swamp. Time is both an abstract concept and a monolithic force. It’s behind extinction, annihilation, memory, age. It’s also an illusion. She writes in the poem “Time is Not”:
There are lifeforms
to which we are merely
a food source
for all our airs
just another product.
Change is real
but time is not.
“Tomorrow’s Box is Quantum” is another take on time, regarded in its smallest possible unit. “Every day is another chance to die of kindness / the infinite regression of immortality.”
“Nobody’s Ancestor” starts, “Time does not resolve. It takes flight, out of the forest, lifting.” The poem ponders succession through time, the “chain of origin, linked like leg / irons, pulling you back to the elements.” But time doesn’t provide an answer to the riddle. The poem concludes:
There are ways to travel, backwards, forwards, up, down,
charmed, minus red, minus blue. You can go in any line you
want, you’ll always find your way back.
A whole section of poems is called “Chronon,” which is a discrete unit of time that is part of an hypothesis that proposes that time is not continuous. This is a view already anticipated in “Tomorrow’s Box is Quantum,” which puts a spotlight on the theme. Ball writes in the first poem of this section, “Eastern Whipbird,” “that time is a construct.” Later in the Chronon section, in “Symmetry Breaking,” she writes:
Time is nothing more than water
warm rain, piss
the elemental trickle
from a well of sulphur
and longing.
“Life can only be understood backwards” takes on memory and time in focusing on a war veteran, suffering from PTSD, occasionally moved by rage, “who knows / everything heals after enough time.”
In one of the final poems in the collection, “Hall of Mirrors,” a memory poem about an old flame, Ball writes, “We know time isn’t a straight line. / It twists back on itself, bending limbs / thickening in the veins…”
While all of this is thought-provoking and vividly written, what are the practical implications? The very first section of the book, “The Age of Waste,” spells out the bleak consequences. In poems like “AKA” and “Qi Qi, the Endling,” Ball mourns the extinction of species, all the result of human activity. An “endling” is the last known individual of a species – “Her name is Mud / last of her kind,” is how Ball starts “AKA,” and in the catalogue of lost fish, reptiles, and lizards, in “Qi Qi, the Endling,” she lists Martha, last of the once ubiquitous passenger pigeons, “hunted from hero to zero in fifty years” – clearly a victim of human rapacity.
“Hardwire Billboard” spells out a sad verdict:
The billboard
flashing in neon excess
buy buy buy bye
hardwired to self-interest.
“Is Blue an Earth Tone?” further explains the situation, our planet Earth “melting / under the hot weight of humanity / bearing down.”
The poem “Wing Feathers” alludes to an individual with a colossal sense of entitlement (Donald Trump comes to my mind), but its very shape visually suggests the shameful diminishment caused by humans.
It always comes back to the bird: brood parasite
puffed simulation of a tougher species, the way
he reached out an arm artificially extended
and grabbed with privilege’s casual grace.
Of course there’s the violence: nudge of
hip or all out smack, easiest with small
eggs or chicks, curved beaks, striped
plumage, power of the pack, slogans.
Hiding behind a noisy machine
cutting words into barbs, into
zero-sum, winner takes all
consumption the point
the rest can starve.
Insults often reflect
the wielder, slinger
slavering leads to
such truncation
onomatopoetic
mud this
cuck.
Is there any sense of redemption in all this? Magdalena Ball’s does not sound like a woe-is-me (vey ist mir) voice. Far from it. Yes, “nothing lasts,” as she concludes the poem, “Passerine,” but given the yo-yo that is time, nothing is inevitable, either. “I try to be sad, but all I feel / is desire,” she writes in “Rhythmic Oscillations,” and the whole collection ends on a triumphant note in the poem, “Mitzvah”:
Your voice carries.
You are setting yourself free
you are free
My absolute favorite poem in The Density of Compact Bone? The tribute to William Butler Yeats, at his graveside, in “Drumcliff Church.” The poem ends where the entire collection begins, philosophically – with time:
Time collapses inward
and now, if there even is a now
there’s no distinction between those
bleached, buried bones and your soft
dissipated ashes.
This is a collection to be read and then read again.
Dec 3 2021
London Grip Poetry Review – Magdalena Ball
Poetry review – THE DENSITY OF COMPACT BONE : Charles Rammelkamp accompanies Magdalena Ball on a poetic exploration of the nature of time
Magdalena Ball’s overriding theme in The Density of Compact Bone is time. What is it? How does it work? What are its effects? Is it even real? Over and over again, contemplating the world, she runs into the conundrum of time, “time’s honey,” as she refers to it in the poem “soul clap”: sweet and sticky, trapping language and perception in its gummy swamp. Time is both an abstract concept and a monolithic force. It’s behind extinction, annihilation, memory, age. It’s also an illusion. She writes in the poem “Time is Not”:
“Tomorrow’s Box is Quantum” is another take on time, regarded in its smallest possible unit. “Every day is another chance to die of kindness / the infinite regression of immortality.”
“Nobody’s Ancestor” starts, “Time does not resolve. It takes flight, out of the forest, lifting.” The poem ponders succession through time, the “chain of origin, linked like leg / irons, pulling you back to the elements.” But time doesn’t provide an answer to the riddle. The poem concludes:
A whole section of poems is called “Chronon,” which is a discrete unit of time that is part of an hypothesis that proposes that time is not continuous. This is a view already anticipated in “Tomorrow’s Box is Quantum,” which puts a spotlight on the theme. Ball writes in the first poem of this section, “Eastern Whipbird,” “that time is a construct.” Later in the Chronon section, in “Symmetry Breaking,” she writes:
“Life can only be understood backwards” takes on memory and time in focusing on a war veteran, suffering from PTSD, occasionally moved by rage, “who knows / everything heals after enough time.”
In one of the final poems in the collection, “Hall of Mirrors,” a memory poem about an old flame, Ball writes, “We know time isn’t a straight line. / It twists back on itself, bending limbs / thickening in the veins…”
While all of this is thought-provoking and vividly written, what are the practical implications? The very first section of the book, “The Age of Waste,” spells out the bleak consequences. In poems like “AKA” and “Qi Qi, the Endling,” Ball mourns the extinction of species, all the result of human activity. An “endling” is the last known individual of a species – “Her name is Mud / last of her kind,” is how Ball starts “AKA,” and in the catalogue of lost fish, reptiles, and lizards, in “Qi Qi, the Endling,” she lists Martha, last of the once ubiquitous passenger pigeons, “hunted from hero to zero in fifty years” – clearly a victim of human rapacity.
“Hardwire Billboard” spells out a sad verdict:
The billboard flashing in neon excess buy buy buy bye hardwired to self-interest.“Is Blue an Earth Tone?” further explains the situation, our planet Earth “melting / under the hot weight of humanity / bearing down.”
The poem “Wing Feathers” alludes to an individual with a colossal sense of entitlement (Donald Trump comes to my mind), but its very shape visually suggests the shameful diminishment caused by humans.
Is there any sense of redemption in all this? Magdalena Ball’s does not sound like a woe-is-me (vey ist mir) voice. Far from it. Yes, “nothing lasts,” as she concludes the poem, “Passerine,” but given the yo-yo that is time, nothing is inevitable, either. “I try to be sad, but all I feel / is desire,” she writes in “Rhythmic Oscillations,” and the whole collection ends on a triumphant note in the poem, “Mitzvah”:
Your voice carries. You are setting yourself free you are freeMy absolute favorite poem in The Density of Compact Bone? The tribute to William Butler Yeats, at his graveside, in “Drumcliff Church.” The poem ends where the entire collection begins, philosophically – with time:
This is a collection to be read and then read again.