SALMAGUNDI: A Poetic Feast

Salmagundi - an omnium gatherum by Ronda Wicks Eller

Poetry Friendly Press, 2023, 242 pp  ISBN  978-1-926495-90-3                                               

    A review by David Stones, Stratford, Ontario poet, performer and spoken word artist

 

Salmagundi, the sprawling compendium of Canadian poet Ronda Wicks Eller’s works over the past 40 years, is an aptly titled buffet of poetic forms, varied but obliquely entwined themes, shifting rhythms and a veritable alphabet soup of rhyme schemes. Divided into eight sections of poems by book titles and chronological sequence, we witness through her writing the maturing and artistic development of this fine poet, as Wicks Eller grapples with the mysteries of love, regret, fulfillment and everything in between. Along the way, Wicks Eller conjures the likes of Shelley, Keats, Byron, Whitman, and yes, even The Bard himself

          “I would divorce my fleshy tongue

          to speak your name just once

          and gladly sever my carnal ears”

while openly adoring and paying poetic homage to William Butler Yeats and Leonard Cohen. This is a remarkable journey, a salmagundi feast of poetic delights, helmed by a perceptive and polished wordsmith.

 

The early first person, internalized poems of “My Harmonic Perfection,” give way to richer, more nuanced verse in the “Whale Songs In The Aurora Borealis” section, where the ghosts of the great romantic poets freight the words and Jupiter, Pan, Juno, The Trickster and the mythical Greystone dance between the lines. These are poems of enchanted lands, of kings and princes, knaves and maidens

          “of the entranced castle’s speaking

          syllabic things entwined though not yet bred.”

Yet Wicks Eller here and throughout never loses track of her own heartstrings, as she returns to a first person lament in the beautiful reflection “Shadow Of A Last Known Course,” where the poet tells us how

          “Inside a hindsight harbour I have learned

          love’s bones float home

          like driftwood once tide’s turned.”

 

And while the poet explores haiku and senryu poetry forms with the “Field” poems, and provides a diversified tapestry of themes and stylings in the concluding “Poems Old And New” section, Wicks Eller hits her high point in the selections from her 2019 “Hoofprints On The Moon.” The poems slow here, open like flowers to show us their dazzling petals, fully accessible and open to our emotional engagement. These pieces embrace many Cohenesque touches, including Leonard’s familiar ABCB rhyme scheme and powerfully direct word choice:

          “Who offered you my temple?

          Who offered you my hand

          and the right to claim my body

          as your private promised land?”

Other poems capitalize on and are clearly inspired by Cohen’s key albums of the day, as in “Come Healing II” and “We Travel Light.” Many of these poems rue what Wicks Eller once had or longed for at the time, particularly in matters of the heart:

          “Your lips never dared to kiss me

          you filthy naked refugee.

          Your eyes never swam my sea—

          no lover ever loved so much of me.”

 

Salmagundi is not an easy book to review, as each poetry section claims a distinct identity in its own right. But as with any wonderfully orchestrated buffet spread, the whole here is greater than the sum of its parts. Collectively, Wicks Eller’s lifetime selection of poems works beautifully, anointing the reader with a wide swath of poetic styles, varied structure, and finely honed attention to cadence and meter. But, as our dear Leonard would say, when it all comes down to dust, it’s the words that count. And here Wicks Eller shows her sparkle, pinning her heart to every line and reminding us once again that

          “When we pry ourselves out and onto the page

          we bleed through our fingers and into the pen.”

 

 

 

SALMAGUNDI: Here Is The Day We Came Here For

Salmagundi - an omnium gatherum by Ronda Wicks Eller

Poetry Friendly Press, 2023, 242 pp  ISBN  978-1-926495-90-3                                                

          A review by John B. Lee, author, poet, editor, Poet Laureate of Brantford, ON in perpetuity and of Norfok County 2010 - 2014,     

          with around 100 publications & chapbooks et al. Recipent of over 60 international awards.

 

I love learning new words. So, when I first received Ronda Wicks Eller’s 242 page magnum opus, an eight part collection of her poetry, representing her work from 1994 through to 2022, including an appendix with fourteen pages of reviews of her work along with two pages of acknowledgements, the very first thing I did before cracking the cover involved researching the meaning of her title and her subtitle. Although she provides a helpful definition of the word salmagundi’s culinary denotation on the back cover, and although she places the mischief of the image of a fork on the front, rather than being a salad plate of chopped meats, anchovies, eggs, and vegetables, there are synonyms that more satisfactorily describe this collection. The French word from which the title is derived, the word “salmigondis’ means a disparate assembly of things, ideas, forming a whole, and the phrase “omnium gatherum” affirms this meaning in that it translates as “a miscellaneous collection”.

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Doing just a bare minimum of inference, this book covers the career of a poet whose first poems, included here, were published when she was a mere nineteen years of age. Born in 1965, this book represents a span of thirty-eight years in a very productive poet’s career. In addition to the evolution of themes one might expect from a poet as she matures, there is also a great variety of forms and styles ranging from relatively conventional rhyming quatrains of the early work, and culminating in the long line two-page poems in the closing section of the book. Each of the eight sections of the book in addition to being clustered around a theme, is often also representative of a literary genre she is engaging in.

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In Section Seven “Ashram of Love” (Sufi poetry), she echoes the Song of Solomon by using the easily recognized stock descriptive phrase “My Beloved …” Here’s Eller:

          “My Beloved,

          I look for You in shadows

          with eyes that register best in light.

          In the dark of night I feel

          Your presence there

          with mine.”

And here is one verse from Solomon’s Song II, xvi, “My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies.” It is impossible not to notice the homage, the echo, the parallel, especially in her explanation of "Beloved – God in His Loving aspect/ beloved -another significant person/ Beloved Burning – purification process of the Soul". And when some Biblical scholars in their exegesis suggest that Solomon’s Song is a metaphor for religious devotion, it is not impossible to see the parallels here between Eller and the poet of the Bible.

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In one of my favourite sections of the book, Section Six: field haiku and senryu, I found myself giggling at the naughty more scatological and playful haiku.  After reading these, I was drawn to revisit the author photograph on the back cover where Ronda Wicks Eller seems to be laughing and having the time of her life.

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There are dark moments, especially in the final section of the collection Section Eight: poems new and old, wherein she pays homage to poets she admires like William Butler Yeats, and more frequently Leonard Cohen. Cohen’s phrase “you want it darker,” which she quotes comes to mind here. In a very moving poem “Her Little Suitcases" her protagonist thankfully triumphs as she writes in the closing lines

          “She was not a victim of abuse

          but a survivor!”

She is writing very poignant and topical verse here, some of it coming right out of the pages of the pandemic where she coins the phrase “Covidian breeze” to give gravitas to this chilling indictment of

          “the blamers blaming both flanks

          like wild dogs scavenging after

          the last ounce of dripping meat

          grappling for the right to point a finger

          instead of raising

          a torch.”

Eller takes on the deep state accusations of the crowd, and then like Cohen she celebrates the light, as in her poem “Here is the Light” she repeats a variation on one of Cohen’s most oft quoted phrases “where the light gets in”. And who would not celebrate a poet who writes, as she does in this poem:

          "Here is the day we came for,

          our sweet love made down to the core,

          here is the night and the sign on the door

          heralding peace while declaring war

                    where the light gets in."
 

In the journey, reading this book, this reader is brought full circle, not only because the poet returns to the rhyming quatrains of her earliest work, but more importantly because she brings maturity to bear on the deepening of understanding that tempers the language as we age.

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