Reviewed by Tom Haushalter
1.22.07

Within each of the tiny, delicate, acutely honed poems of Cynthia Cruz’s excellent debut collection, Ruin, is the very distinct possibility of death. Cruz has so boiled down her lines and her heartrending narrative strain to these 40-odd pages of exquisite lyrical gestures that the precipice of breakdown is just as near.

Rightfully, her narrative is closely guarded, deeply embedded—and fragmented—in the marrow of these poems. Not at all despite this approach, though, does a colorful, indeed, haunted portrait of the poet’s youth emerge. To be gleaned from it is a death, clearly her brother’s. There is an accident by gun; suicide isn’t out of the question. A sense of violence resides in the collective mood of Ruin, whether or not it’s obvious who is harmed and by whom. The truth is, the necessary events are adequately conveyed; to enjoy these poems, then, is to permit the elliptical mind of a poet deeply grieved and disquieted, who is sifting through detritus and artifacts presumably to find reconciliation, or a way to heal. “The Report on Horses” is a telling glimpse, worth quoting entirely:

Then, the final season of my brother’s visit.
His long dark hair in his face, and shirtsleeves
Concealing his thin white arms. Like a girl, he was always
Trading in what little he owned
Of his life. Already he was
Too fragile for the world.

In my mind I have been hiding
Among the Ruinous thistle of last winter:
Fox, my girlhood horse, wasting away in the barn,
Her weak limbs at rest along the tremendous dark
of her body.

In many moments throughout the book, as in this poem, the speaker is hiding. She is not unlike a spiritualist who wishes to leave her body. If at times her escapist, self-exiling tendencies come off histrionic (e.g. “As a girl, I was razored / Into the world. I was never close to anyone,” from “Prelude to 220, or 110”) or too sonically agonized (e.g. “Into the ice-ravaged ragweed and phlox / I vanished,” from “Shoot”), Cruz’s portrayal of this bereft, mysterious, imaginative girl remains believable. As in “Twelve in Yellow-Weed at the Edge”:

Then, the police arrive—they don’t find me.
I’m disguised as a boy in a champagne wig
And hid inside the gold rattle of a warm Appalachia wind.

The manifold disguise of the wig (which makes her a boy) within the wind’s “gold rattle” is simply perfect. These lines in which “champagne” and “Appalachia,” for their assonance and somehow common tint and tone, despite one’s urbanity and the other’s rusticity, seem like long-lost etymological siblings.

Cruz dons another hairpiece and is even more brilliant in the aptly titled “Self-Portrait in Horsehair Wig,” declaring, “Like water at the throat, I’ll be adored / By a kneeling army of boys.” One also begins to suspect that Cruz’s speaker is somehow fugitive. Again, it is not clear why. In a “horsehair wig,” she is closer to accepting who she is, for “in a blue blood summer, you’ll be criminal: clyde-like, dark-eyed, timid.”

Affection for animal disguises is surpassed only by invocations of the departed; as part coping mechanism, part poetic device, Cruz often steps into her brother’s shoes. Or, literally, she “woke on the highway, / Thin in my dead brother’s clothes.” While obviously more psychologically complex than a sister’s life-long grief over her brother, the poem that seems to embody the book’s thematic core is Cruz’s starkest example of this familial transformation, titled “You Will Be Like Your Dreams Tonight II”:

I discovered father’s shotgun. Dug it out from the earth like a tooth. There was one worm in particular. Moving, the raw pink of it Looked like the skin of my own mouth. I killed it with the stud of my bracelet. Then entered the hall of the house like a son.

Sometimes, however, these self-portraits wreak too much self-inflicted pain. I cite the aforementioned poem’s fraternal twin, “You Will Be Like Your Dreams Tonight,” as an example. “Locked in a coop with the animals” is how it opens. Then, “I went feral. / I went starboard.” Just this once, I don’t believe it.

Also noteworthy is Cruz’s reliance on repetition to forge Ruin’s various enchanted landscapes. It becomes clear in the first section of the book that Cruz keeps a stable of precious words, a glossary like a palette of favorite hues—words intimate and interchangeable, many appearing at least a handful of times. One gains an idea of the mood and tone she’s after just by listing them: blue, dark, winter, ice, night, weather, dead, alive, gun, blood (also bloodhound, blood-spattered), boyhood, small, animal, orchard, milk, horses, falcon, girl. Fond also of odd strains of wildflowers, she peppers in bindweed, ragweed, and (my personal favorite) “ghost-weed.”

The echoing of words like ‘winter’ imbues the spooky gloom of Cruz’s lines:

Discover a hidden winter trapped in a snuffbox. (“Self-Portrait in Horsehair Wig”)

A field, a world, a winter / Of Singing that would not stop. (“Goleta”)

And you, / My winter, I do not believe / I imagined you might leave. (“Self-Portrait in Froehlichia”)

Cruz’s repetitive inclinations illuminate the central, tragic subject of her poems, rather than limit its artistic potential. At best, Cruz’s language has a surreptitious stride to it. The nature of her torment calls for memory to pinpoint the objects, the seasons, the colors—again, the detritus and artifacts—that are honest, irrefutable, and irreplaceable.

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