THE PATIENCE OF ICE

The poems in the first two sections of this four-part volume, the strongest of the collection, move from the German-born Colorado poet’s childhood experience in war-torn Germany to the aging and death of her mother. The poems here explore rather arbitrary but riveting details that contributed to the intense sorrow surrounding both events: for example, the soil her mother carefully wipes from her wedding band after burying a mouse in the backyard later becomes indelibly associated with the dirt on the ring on her father’s hand in death. The child poet then retrospectively links her father’s death with the burial of the mouse, treating the latter as a sort of premonition: “when I thought of him walking through the streets / in those last days, there was always a mouse on the sidewalk / scampering ahead like a shadow before him.” Rings reappear in a later poem situated after her mother’s death, when the nursing home gives the adult poet two wedding bands worn by her mother, one of which had been mistakenly placed on her hand. The poem, “Two Rings,” is a wonderful representation of this poet’s strengths and excesses. Wood’s talent lies in identifying themes underlying uncanny life events, and her poetic spareness often works well to project the indescribable aspects of aging, mourning, and loss. But the one recurrent distraction in her work comes at a poem’s conclusion, where the subject’s essence—having been distilled in the penultimate lines—gets spooned down the reader’s throat in a most disagreeable manner.

Lines of gushing accessibility aside: a moving selection of moments riddled with life’s ironies.