TRIBUTARIES

The poems in this collection speak lyrically of spirituality, nature, travel, love, and moments of perception in free verse, prose poems, haiku, and senryu.

Ballingham, a singer, art educator, and president of Tucson, Arizona–based music-production company Earth Mother Productions, divides her debut book of poems into 12 chapters. The first, “In Places Far Away,” contains pieces that touch on the concepts of travel and distance, whether actual or metaphorical. Chapter 2, “Beach Walk: The Baja Connection,” focuses on how a particular destination teases the speaker out of thought: “When the walking stops, / tranquility fills inner spaces.” The poems in Chapter 3, “Promise of Fullness,” concern love of various kinds—romantic, familial, and spiritual. The speaker in “How Can I Say I Love You?” for instance, combines the romantic and the spiritual forms of love in a description of a loved one as elusive, “an incandescence / of something grander / breathing on the other side.” Chapters 4 and 5, “Another Root and Stem” and “Climb the High Stairs,” include poems linking the natural world and the spiritual. The works in Chapter 6, “Even the Ocean Has a Floor,” concern death, loss, dreams, and memory but also renewal. Other chapters treat “pivotal” moments (Chapter 7, “Live It Simple”), creativity (Chapter 8, “The Muse: More Air Than Earth”), mortality (Chapter 9, “We Princelings”), men and women (Chapter 10, “Origins”), and specific colors (Chapter 11, “Reflections on Color”). The final chapter offers haiku and senryu poems that contemplate aspects of nature and love. At her best, Ballingham employs precise, unexpected images that vividly evoke a number of different emotional states. In “Valentine’s Day on the Surgical Ward,” for example, she describes the menacing feel of a late-night hospital room by employing an effective bit of anthropomorphism: “If you think about what lurks, / the future might exhale into your face / and snuff out the sun.” She also describes the ward as a “restless labyrinth / filled with lives making right-angle turns,” an image that nicely links the turns of a maze with the ways that illness diverts people from a forward path. Some poems, such as “And Then, My Love,” have a pithy, aphoristic quality: “The prayer is just air until you say it, / the heart is mute until you sing it, / the ceremony is dormant until you do it.” Others, though, offer merely pretty description without resolution or surprise; in “Low Tide,” for example, snails create “lacy etchings / that take my breath / away.” Although Ballingham’s interest in diverse spiritual practices seems deeply felt, as when she borrows a Lakota term for Grandmother Earth in “Unčí Makĥá,” some readers may find the way that she makes use of certain images, such as the raven of Pacific Northwest Native American traditions; the star people of the Cree, Lakota, and other nations; Dreamtime of Australian Aboriginal peoples; and Pele of native Hawaiians, to be culturally appropriative.

Often dreamy and occasionally sharp poems whose spirituality draws from numerous outside sources.