Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp
Love Prodigal
by Traci Brimhall
Copper Canyon Press
Feb 2025, $17.00, 112 pages, ISBN: 9781556597022
At the heart of Traci Brimhall’s enchanting new collection is the image of the phoenix, the mythical bird that rises from its own ashes – resurrection, second chances. The aubade is a recurring form in Love Prodigal, a love poem signifying sun-up, lovers parting at dawn (“Aubade as Fuel,” “Numb Aubade with Bloodhound,” “Aubade with a Confederacy of Daisies,” “Aubade on a Ghost Hunt”). Interestingly, the fleuron, or glyph, that signals the start of each new section of this book, is a rising sun. All of this points to Brimhall’s overarching vision of our (i.e., her) messy human lives. “I like being a mammal,” she begins “Lacrimosa,” her poem about crying, “the only animal that weeps.” The poem ends:
I like that I am a messy animal full of melancholy
with working knees and toes that crack when
I walk downstairs, weak hands and a softening
chin that makes me see my mother in the mirror,
crying her famous tears, this time saying
she loves what I’ve done with my hair.
Love Prodigal is composed of seven sections, each announced by the sunrise glyph. Six contain seven poems each, while the fourth section, at the center of the collection, is a brilliant sequence of “prose sonnets” called “Diary of Fires,” which opens more or less with the phoenix. The second stanza informs us:
Herodotus introduced the phoenix to the west, though he never
beheld it with his own eyes. People think he may have confused it with
a flamingo or crane, some bird that already had a name.
Brimhall goes on to cite Leonardo da Vinci choosing the phoenix “to represent Constancy”; Shakespeare’s poem, “The Phoenix and the Turtle” about “the funeral of two birds in love”; Pliny the Elder’s origin stories about the phoenix; the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s insights into metaphors while speaking of fire and psychoanalysis. But “What I most want to understand about the phoenix,” she confesses, “is its loneliness, how the myth promises renewal, rebirth, but to live forever is to live alone.” For despite everything, the love of partners, parents and offspring, Brimhall is so conscious of living in her own skin.
The three previous seven-poem sequences and the three that follow the “Diary of Fires”, while all part of the same expression, reflections on living, focus on different aspects of the equation (divorce, childhood, motherhood, new love, the resilience of nature, etc.). Brimhall so succinctly expresses the central proposition of “resurrection” in the poem “Resolution”: “The pain of suffering warms into // the pain of healing.” Life is messy indeed, but second chances are real. So is healing. So is love.
Though she starts with the cruel heartbreak of a divorce, Brimhall looks to the resilience of the natural world to explain our own renewal. In “Doctrine of Signatures” she writes that “our aches believe in forever,” and then adds:
Because for centuries, translating pain proved difficult,
and because no other answer announced itself,
great medical minds assumed nature must be a public
and universal manuscript of healing, each hairy root
an analogue for the body and its hurts.
Poems like “Entomotherapy” (the practice of using insects for therapeutic purposes), “Refugia” and “A Group of Moths” revel in nature, its beauty and restorative powers. “Love Is” likewise luxuriates in natural images to make its point:
Love is a spring
storm coming to weep its petty joys all over
the bees in the graveyard. Love is a nest
of moonlight, by which I mean nothing
real but still something beautiful, seductive
as any good image.
It’s lightning promising a flood of flames; it can be endured with the patience of the rose of Jericho; it’s the museum of confessions and shared sleeps, she offers in the same poem, images that are lyrical and beckoning.
As is evident in her line about her mother telling her through her tears that she loves what her daughter’s done with her hair, Brimhall has a delightfully sly sense of humor. It’s on display in poems like “Admissions Essay” (“I could have been valedictorian if the metrics / were ardor and potential for transformation”), “Ode to Oxytocin at a Distance,” “I Would Do Anything for Love but I Won’t” (“cook lobster. They’re loyal sea rubies and deserve / better than a pinch of lemon and herbed butter…I won’t give up coffee or pistachios / or my dog.”)
Brimhall writes funny but deeply heartfelt poems about her mother. “Matrophobia” (fear of becoming your mother), “Prayer against Diagnosis” (“Darling Mountain Fire, swear my mother and I are different / enough. Her heart, a babel of magpies. My heart hived / to the white funeral of hours.”), “Speculative Elegy,” “Attachment Theory.”
“Love keeps returning with sweet corn from / the farmer’s market,” she begins “Aubade with a Confederacy of Daisies,” and yes, these poems, as the title of the collection suggests, are as much about love as anything. As Traci Brimhall, who is the poet laureate of Kansas, consoles her corporeal self in the charming penultimate poem,
Body, Remember,
But don’t worry, you were only an animal.
One day you’ll get to die like everything you admire,
and your beloved will forget your face. Remember
it is not because he failed to love you well, but because
his brain doesn’t hold faces. Your brain will hold so
little then, too, so you can become what’s next. It will
be beautiful, body, your cells undressing, forgetting.
And over legs you endlessly shaved, grasses will grow
like you—eager, wild, surviving every day they can.
What’s next will be beautiful, indeed. This elegantly symmetrical collection ends on a triumphant note in “Will & Testament.” The last line to her love about the practical challenges of the phoenix’s resurrection? “Stay awake. Be ready. I’m already burning.”
About the reviewer: Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. His poetry collection, A Magician Among the Spirits, poems about Harry Houdini, is a 2022 Blue Light Press Poetry winner. A collection of poems and flash called See What I Mean? was recently published by Kelsay Books, and another collection of persona poems and dramatic monologues involving burlesque stars, The Trapeze of Your Flesh, was just published by BlazeVOX Books.