RONDA WICKS ELLER

SPINNING THE SOUL

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     This poetry collection could just as well have been titled "Spinning the Soul". Poem after poem deals fairly and openly with various vicissitudes of life, drawing the reader in, spinning the soul in surprising directions!

     Just as any cycle has its high and low points, so do Eller's poems spin the reader from ebullient enthusiasm to the depths of despair and back again! She leaves no topic unexamined and wistfully mingles seemingly incompatible ones: In "Au Courant", for example, scientific terms and feelings are woven together seamlessly. And again, in "Ripple", a wonderfully expressed personal darkness poem, she juxtaposes the anger of smashing dishes with one's place in the universe.

     Eller uses various poetic forms, both modern free-verse and some well-tried and tested forms. In "Pulled from that Spindled Track" she achieves a beautifully flowing classical style and captures the fluidity of life, then continues her unrelenting spin!

     She achieves an utterly beautiful scene in "She Speaks to Him of Perfect Union", another classical style with an abbc rhyme pattern. "Oh soul that drifts through moods on open sea / and harbours all its hopes in undertow." But besides the classical poetic styles, Eller reaches back to pre-Classical times. In "The Lamentations of Isis", she takes Egypt's primordial myth and conjures up Isis with all her pain of loss within the context of Wisdom. In "Armageddon's Bride", a personality splintered from the Book of Revelations, Eller cleverly shifts from the common people who are the usual victims of Armageddon, to the bride waiting for the "crimson knight". Eller, like many thinking and feeling people puts the threat of the Whore of Babylon behind her and recognizes the new feminine principle risen after an age of religious repression.

     In "Come My Lover", she creates notable lines such as "You've learned to murmur / recitations of your own rising" and "before the morning lifts its lids / and tries to catch us with its glare..." Jungians will immediately recognize the lifelong dance of the Ego and the Animus, a relationship that needs constant work. It is soon followed by "The Alliance..." another well composed Ego-Animus story, not so veiled this time. The kingpin or the keystone in this collection is "The Lion and the Golden Calf: A Vision". This is the poem from which the book takes its title. It successfully tackles the immense chasm between Western and Eastern spirituality in four short stanzas, rhyming abba.

     In "The Henge's Kiss", Eller continues to spin cycles. In this three part poem, "Lead me to the wood-rot rings" gives us a clue right off that we are dealing with a wood-henge in an abbcca rhyming pattern. In the second part, about a stone henge, it is still the poet who kisses "those sarsen stones!" In the third and final part, however, the poet lives and dies, "from life to death to life I pass". Unspoken, the poet establishes the everlastingness of all things within cycles and through her own cycles she makes the henges everlasting as well.

     Love and pain are recurring cycles in Eller's poetry. In "The Ivy and the Rose" she hints that "divine entanglement" may be assured by quantum entanglement, but hopes that so is love! Whereas quite a few previous poems dealt with love spurned, here "we are spurred on with each sunrise / to reach out and touch again!"

     Eller's collection on the whole is a wonderful read! She calls upon her muses, Robert Frost, Wm. B. Yeats and John Donne, and seamlessly shifts to travels within her soul. Love and loneliness spin along with impertinence and defiance, allowing the reader a variety that is always welcome to make a poetry book readable and valuable!

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• DANIEL KOLOS, Egyptologist, author, poet and documentary writer, member of Highway 4 Writers, Words Aloud Poetry Cooperative, The Ontario Poetry Society and the League of Canadian Poets.