By Margaret Lee
Unruly Tree
by Leslie Ullman
University of New Mexico Press
August 2024, 86 pages, $18.95 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0826366702
Self-Portrait as Vanishing Act
by Leslie Ullman
Lily Poetry Review Books
March 2025, 36 pages, $12.00 (paperback), ISBN-13: 978-1957755557
Clear, sensuous, and accessible, Leslie Ullman’s poems exhibit the vast scope of creative imagination in her two new poetry collections, Unruly Tree: Poems and Self-Portrait as Vanishing Act. Striking for their sharp focus and mesmerizing for their rich vocabulary, these collections transport readers to imagined realms that are also vividly real. It has been a productive year for this acclaimed poet and writing teacher, who released two new poetry collections within eight months of each other.
Leaving behind the “new and selected” concept, poetry collections today typically cohere around a theme. Often those themes seem broadly construed or faintly applied throughout the collection. By contrast, strong book concepts distinguish Ullman’s new collections. Unruly Tree: Poems derives its inspiration from composer Brian Eno and artist Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards designed to spur creativity in a range of artistic pursuits. Ulman uses Eno’s and Schmidt’s various oblique strategies for creativity from the deck of cards as the titles of her poems. Self-Portrait as Vanishing Act emerges from a workshop led by Andrea Watson, herself a witty and inventive poet and founding publisher of 3: A Taos Press. Ullman’s book embraces the chaos of ordinary experience by inhabiting characters, events, and inanimate objects, then describing selfhood from those points of view.
The free verse poems in both collections typically employ sentence syntax, easing the reader’s task by delivering words in complete grammatical units. There the similarity with prosody ends, for Ullman’s colorful language and varied appeals to sensory experience make her stanzas shimmer as poetry. I especially notice olfactory references. From Unruly Tree: a vial of Old Spice or Shalimar; lemons, toothpaste/and olives; fragrant with dirt and damp leaves; microwave popcorn; warm hands/scented with oil. From Self-Portrait: a drawer smelling of pennies and old pencils; rooms/smelling of ammonia and burnt matches; smell of wet wool; smelling of lemon oil; a room that smelled of new paper and chalk; card catalogues smelling of oak and varnish.
The opening poem of Unruly Tree, “Just Carry On,” sets the book’s tone. “I want every hil”l, she writes, and the sound of my breath pushing/metaphor into the dark—//that kind of listening. The poem ends, “I want to cull the best fruit/from an unruly tree.//I want the entire tree”. Ullman delivers on this wild aspiration with alacrity and grace. In “Listen in total darkness or in a very large room, very quietly,” she chronicles the onset of creativity: “Come first the words you’ve always/reached for…come next the blankness…come surrender; come drift…come the music of your breath…come dreamed flint.” From the sweep of daily life, Ullman displays a knack for highlighting the singular. In “Only one element of each kind,” she writes, A single smudge…One charcoal curve…a spill of yellow…One raspberry out of season…frost flake before warmed air/drips it from windshield. The one life that ends too soon….”
Ullman’s responses to Eno’s and Schmidt’s prompts grasp the full range of creative possibility. Her poems feel equally at home in the disparate realms of visual art, music, and literature. In a single poem, “Honor thy error as hidden intention,” Ullman gives us a muttering Robert Motherwell, Mondrian and matchsticks, Henry Moore and river stones, and Jackson Pollock with fault lines. “Use unacceptable color” explores bad art: “Magenta the shade of/raw beef left in the sun….bruise blue…Color of sickness in the liver…” In fewer than three lines, the beginning of “Is the tuning appropriate?” captures the suspenseful moment before a symphony begins: “Attenuated A before the maestro/steps out—the note unfolds, golden wing,/from a single bow stroke….”
Ullman’s scope extends beyond the classical. “Mechanize something idiosyncratic” describes the nonmusic….Crimson and Clover dismantled the human voice,/squeezing it through a strainer to an infinity/of echoes, slipping electronic composition/into AM radio before Pink Floyd/drenched it in discordant renditions of /one bad trip after another.” Her poetic observations build a vibrant picture of the creative process. Go ahead—fling yourself against it, advises “Ask people to work against their better judgment. And trust/that something unassailable will evolve/the way runoff and tectonic shifts/make eons of microscopic inroads below/earth’s surface before a single mountain/made itself known.” This promise concludes “Accretion.”
Self-Portrait as Vanishing Act testifies to Ullman’s keen instinct for beginnings and endings. She opens the collection with “Self Portrait as a Jigsaw Puzzle,” which concludes, “no matter what/you “see”/I am always/in pieces”, an appropriate beginning to a parade of different selves, conceived in myriad ways. “Self Portrait as a Thrift Store Find” concludes with exhilaration: “If you run a finger/along my rim, I still sing.” Her sober portrayal of death in “Self Portrait as an Epitaph” ends, “Reading me, some/might imagine what I know and do not say: absolute, the veil between worlds.”
Nor is Ullman’s gaze voyeuristic. Instead, compassion and honesty mark her portraits. With poignancy, “Self Portrait as an Eraser” observes, “First grade was my introduction to the line between//the gifted and the ordinary.” “Self Portrait as My Nemesis” confesses, “At gatherings, my first wish is to take up/no space; my next is to be surrounded by/people who want to know more and more/about me….” “Self Portrait with a Second Language” laments, “I live by loneliness/and longing. I am all pause,/m-dash, and stutter, though/the mind seethes with nuance…”.
Still, Ullman’s self-portraits take a stand. “Self Portrait as an O’Keefe Flower” declares, “So let me set things straight: I am not/orifice, nor birth-portal, and most surely not/invitation….Whatever else I hide in there/is mine alone, and I guard it the way the skull, which/O’Keefe also chose to paint, surrounds the secrets/of thought, feeling and sometimes genius.” Her implicit commentary on Homer in “Self Portrait as Penthesilia” delivers a damning judgment: “if anything, his opus makes a fine case/for the waste of war and the blindness/men mistake for courage….”
No review of Ullman’s work would be complete without noticing the sheer beauty of her language. I will draw examples from my favorites in Self-Portrait. “Self Portrait as a Vermeer Painting” begins, “I am window, third eye into the family dwelling/that directs, by illumination, your gaze/towards the peripheral.” “Self Portrait as a Lab Experiment” declares, “I prefer the nerveless dance/of molecules, the fissions and fusions/between them….” “Self Portrait as the Poem I Could Never Write” states,” In the poem I’ll never be, the words are every shade/but white, the music jarring and hard to forget.”
The poems Ullman does write are also unforgettable. Her new collections delight and inspire—Unruly Tree: Poems for its exploration of the creative process, and Self-Portrait as Vanishing Act for its colorful swirl of characters. Reading both will make you wish for more.
About the reviewer: Margaret Lee is a poet, scholar, fiber artist, watercolor sketcher, and aspiring naturalist in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her first full-length poetry collection, Sappho Prompts with Finishing Line Press, will be released in January 2026. She has published four previous chapbooks with Finishing Line Press and her poems have appeared in From Behind the Mask, (Paperback-Press 2020), Echoes of Tradition: Indigenous Orientation to Community, Time, and Land (Tulsa NightWriters 2024), The Atlanta Review, and Pangyrus. Her book reviews also appear in the Taos Journal of Poetry.