The Human Line

The is an arresting collection, Bass mixes the idiosyncratically personal with the ecological and scientific in a way that is truly impressive: tightly controlled verses that take a broad sweep of experience which is portrayed through expert metaphor. I will definitely revisit this collection often.

In an online interview, Ellen Bass says that "poetry is the way I pay attention, appreciate, give praise, struggle, grieve, rage, and pray." Her poetry readily accomplishes all of that. She makes creative use of metaphor as she explores relationships of all kinds, including those of mankind to the environment.The book opens with end-of-life poems about her mother. In "Sleeping in My Mother's Bed," Bass writes stark lines which evoke the knowledge that life is about to change:lie in her bedLike a fork on a folded napkin,Perfectly still and alone.With this perfect simile, Bass captures the isolating emotional state after her mother left by ambulance. Any one of us can picture the image of that fork left on the napkin. Bass invites the reader in, makes the scene immediate and real. Another example of her skill in doing this is the poem "Gate C22", where Bass writes about a couple embracing at an airport gate. She brings the reader into the scene as well as the other people in the airport.The whole wing of the airport hushed,all of us trying to slip into that woman's middle-aged body,her plaid bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses,little gold earrings, tilting our heads up.I read those lines and I wanted to be that woman, I wanted to have that kind of attention lavished on me.Bass makes good use of humor in many of her poems. In "Asking Directions in Paris" she writes of knowing just enough French to ask for directions when in Paris, but not enough to understand the response. I laughed aloud while reading this poem, and I quoted part of it on a recent visit to Spain, where I had a similar experience while trying to impress family members by speaking Spanish.Their universal appeal makes these poems to read and re-read, and to share.

Ellen Bass is a poet who writes out of an exuberant love of life and of language. She is no stranger to either pain or joy, and is unafraid of either. The poems in The Human Line tracking her mother's dying tear my heart out, the love poems suture it with sensuality and tenderness, the "big picture" poems that recognize our place in nature and the cosmic order (or disorder) make my heart expand, and the comedy tickles it. "Gate C22," where we watch an unfashionable middle-aged couple kissing "lavish/ kisses like the ocean in the early morning," is already a classic. But so many other poems will touch you with exquisitely phrased human truth. There's the title poem with a newborn's face "neutral as Buddha," there's "God's Grief," with sympathy for the "Great parent/ who must have started out/ with such high hopes" and became "god of Stalin, god of Somoza,/ god of the long march,/ the trail of tears,/ the trains....desperate god, frantic god, whale heart/ lost in the shallows, beached." Mortality is an important presence in this book, body parts "loosening like the nuts and bolts of an old VW that's rattled over unpaved roads / until the tailpipe's fallen and you've got to tie a rock/ to the gearshift to keep it in fourth." And in the next to last poem, "Don't Expect Applause," Bass asks, "And yet,wouldn't it be welcome/ at the end of each ordinary day?" Yes it would, and I strongly applaud Ellen Bass, a poet for all seasons.

Ellen Bass can paint a scene. She has great emotional clarity and this translates to the page. I admire her for her simplicity. Her lack of smoke and mirrors. Her writing is like the familiar safety of home: no masks. Just a safe place for telling stories.

Ellen Bass is a brilliant poet, teacher, human. If you follow contemporary poetry I suggest you order this book and her latest, “Indigo.”

I am new to LMS of poetry but I really enjoyed reading her work Ellen teach us what she knows about life in writing as natural as breathing air. There is a sense of joy and Solis within each of our palms she has a wonderful way of expressing every day emotions. She is an insightful storyteller and I can't wait to read other things by her in the future.

These are poems that enrich my life, so full of appreciation and beauty!