“The Whole School Is in Me”: A Review of Ronna Bloom’s In a Riptide

At the fall launch event of In a Riptide, at Toronto’s Flying Books, Ronna Bloom put her poetic of plurality into action. The evening felt interwoven by design. Guest poets Maureen Hynes and Soraya Peerbaye first read from the collection, each channelling and layering Bloom’s voice through their own. Bloom then took her place at the mic alongside double-bassist Michael Herring. From the back of the room, and having never heard Bloom speak, I worried an instrument nearly twice her size would drown her out. But there was no need for concern: her words stood just as tall, amplified by accompaniment like light in a mirror. 

Bloom opens this collection—her eighth, out now with Brick Books—with “Immeasurable,”  a poem about a fleeting connection with a woman on the street, which ends:

We stood there with nothing obvious passing between us 
but time. Then she smiled and went away. 
And I thought of the four people the Buddha met in his travels: 
sick person, old person, dead person, happy person with nothing. 
And I felt like all of them. 

The book is split into four sections, organized after each of these four encounters, tracing an arc across different selves and speakers. All are navigating an emotional riptide of some kind— including those of us who pick up these poems. Reading Bloom’s writing is like diving into waters you thought were calm and getting caught in the churn of a poetic containing multitudes. She  herself says as much with a wall-breaking wink. The first section starts with “An Excruciating Blue Day,” where she writes: “I don’t speak spider, but tried to coax one from the sink / then gave up and  flooded it. Yes, there’s an edge to my voice.” Right at the outset, she rejects any one label or assumption we might bring to her book. 

This is less surprising when you consider Bloom’s background of collaboration. With  PLANT Architects, she installed one of her poems as a 30-metre mural on King Street in Toronto. Another became the basis of a one-minute Midi Onodera film that screened at the National Gallery in Ottawa. And she often works at the intersection of poetry and psychotherapy, bringing years of  practice both to healthcare settings like Mount Sinai Hospital, where she developed its first Poet in-Residence program. Bloom resists confinement to the page, or to one school of thought, drawing  from numerous sources to inform her work. 

Here, the Buddhist doctrine anattā—denying the existence of a permanent, unchanging core self—looms large. It’s hard to know where one self ends and the next begins. As her characters process grief and illness, they double in body and identity: “I feel like both the wife and the  husband,” says one, “I turn to look at myself / and wait for one of us to speak.” Another asserts that “the stunt woman with my name / hasn’t gone nearly far enough.” The Buddha himself takes a shower before a triple bypass, and can be read as a stand-in for the late writer Stan Dragland, per  Bloom’s acknowledgements. Pulled into the undertow are Sisyphus, Icarus, and Orlando from  myth; philosophers Gurdjieff and Foucault; Bukowski, Dickinson, and Rilke; and artists such as Rembrandt, Man Ray, Francis Bacon, and Tim Deverell. This is a blender of a book where every living thing is fair game. The speaker in “Between Fur and Skin” links animals together across  countries and art forms: “A goat smiled in a Chagall. / A million taxidermied birds posed or flew  across the centuries.” When the speaker later contemplates our connection to all things—asking  “Who will care for us?”—the answer bursts into the room “pointing skyward, downward, straight  ahead, behind, / in all directions, silently saying, This is us, all this.” In Bloom’s hands, we see the world loop, meander, muddle. Life and death’s murky mysteries disorient before they clarify. 

Bloom’s second section navigates aging, but not without humour. The speaker in the poem “October in My 62nd Year” looks forward to “Metamucil in my gin and tonic, / a boiled egg in the morning, and a trail / of Werther’s candies in a lap around the park.” Deliciously wry details. She goes on to say: 

In the mirror, I see: eyes, face, old woman, 
the blown apart sky, Aunt Lillian 
on a bench on Queen Mary Road, late in her life, 
belonging so completely to herself. 

This is a poet who knows the score: that the older we get, the more we know how little we know. That with age comes an autonomous self—along with the need to release the self. The Buddhist road to enlightenment is paved with paradox, often in the form of koans, questions or dilemmas designed not to be solved but to break through the limitations of logical thought. Contemplating paradox makes deeper insight possible. In “Quiver Fish,” a voice from within begins to speak such insight into being: “i swim to understand. onism means / you can only be in one body. not true. / the whole school is in me and i am in the whole school.” There are several lines like these throughout the book where Bloom favours antimetabole, the technique of syntactic reflection that imbues her poems with an implosive quality—such that selves fold in on themselves. Though concerned with the self, Bloom’s speakers hold themselves accountable to the other. The third section sees characters say their own goodbyes, yes, but also act as shepherds for the dead and grieving, as in “When the veil lifted”: “I left my face at the border. / I left my face in case  someone should want to cross, / so they should not have to be alone.” In “Rending the Garments,”  originally published in The Fiddlehead and arguably Bloom at her most powerful, she opens with the idea that “there should be a shiva for every kind of grief— / the break-up, the diagnosis, the assault—” and ends:

What’s needed is wailing with an axe, fights, 
outings, and touch. Touch and singing. 
Can you hear me? 
Has anyone done that for you, lately 
or ever? Come over, torn open the sky 
and let the snow fall in the wrong month 
to show there’s a rip in the face of the world? 

Taken as an ars poetica, a poem that meditates on the art of poetry, “Rending the Garments” reveals  a great deal about Bloom’s invitational approach. What is a poem if not a dedicated song? If not intimate touch? If not the poet sitting with us “in the big asklessness” (a standout line from “I used  to know,” the poem that gives the collection its title)? We hear her loud and clear; she’s right beside us. And what she’s saying resonates. The earlier “blown apart sky” echoes here in the “rip in the  face of the world,” and again in “Vulnerable to,” where “the mouth of the earth is open,” an image  later brought back in “May I?” with “the mouth of the world / where it’s hot and wet, stinky like a gourd, and keening.” Amplifying a loneliness that is both personal and collective, Bloom does the work of a poet, lending speech to the unsayable. So it’s no accident that we see rips evolve into mouths. When she holds up a mirror to all our seams, we find comfort in what her reflections vocalize.

Which isn’t to say she’s ever sentimental. Her language stays sharp yet fluid. Lines meld and transform like molten sea glass, creating lovely moments of protean wordplay throughout the  collection: “my vibrato, my fascia, my organs, my aura” (from “For I will consider the awareness”); “I flinch till flensed in sound” (from “Vulnerable to”); “a whine, a wail, a horse, a hearse (from “Blue Grit”). In the latter poem, Bloom later writes: “To give to him was to give to the me beyond me. / Releasing the something I sometimes think I am.” Release is the lesson: if caught in a riptide, don’t fight the current or it’ll pull you further out. 

Bloom’s previous collections, including 2017’s The More, explored parallel themes through characters grappling with illness, mortality, and futile desire. Here, years on, her speakers let go.  The fourth and final section begins with “Sisyphus Goes Skiing,” in which he writes to us “from the  top of the mountain,” having cast aside his mythic burden: “I got here, and I was carrying nothing!”  We observe a similar lightness of being in the speaker of “Clothes,” who says, “I took off my body like a shirt, / and what came out was also me, but empty.” There were points where I wanted this  section’s form to reflect its speakers and let go of formal constraints, but it never quite did—not  until the penultimate poem, aptly titled “Happiness,” where Bloom breaks apart her words on the  page with white space.  

That poem offers one of my favourite lines in the collection: “It sounds like bragging, but I  could see from this window / that I’m not special.” Bloom recognizes that our own self-importance makes us “lonely for each other, / in a riptide.” And we can’t fault her for sounding exasperated toward the end of the collection, where she asks, “Everybody knows they’re nobody. Why is this such a problem for us?” Her book doesn’t venture easy answers, but provokes more questions to challenge binary views of the self and the other. That she writes everybody makes Bloom herself a  nobody—but, I hasten to add, she’s like nobody else, and somebody you should be reading if you  haven’t yet, and in many ways, everybody. She feels like all of us. 

Binoy Zuzarte

Binoy Zuzarte (he/him) is a poet and creative director. Recent writing can or will be found in Arc, Augur, The Shore, and Dusie. He lives with his partner and their dog in Toronto, where he is working toward his first book of poetry.