Opening to the very first page of Rosanna Warren’s first collection of poems, Each Leaf Shines Separate, we realize straightaway that we are in the presence of an important new talent.
Petals fell white and remorseless as
snow layering sleep on sleep as sky
hands unrolled one endless bolt of dimity, and down
all floated, veiling the garden where
the real gardenia once, from its cumbrous vase,
exploded in a sand-grit gust to shed
benediction on the sleeping cat:
made the old woman laugh as it unloosed
dangerous sweetness on the air.
This inaugural scene, rich with despair, written in an impulsive, almost ungainly, style, and of rather difficult access, captures our intellectual and emotional attention—and keeps it. For we feel in it an irresistible current of energy—nervous and unsteady, to be sure, but powerful all the same—impelling these lines forward. The tension between the air of desolation in these lines and their irresistible energy and power gives the poem (“Garden”) a quality that we have seldom encountered in our recent poetry.
It is a quality that makes us immediately curious about the elements that have shaped it. What are we to make of this marriage of energy and despair that seems so central to Rosanna Warren’s poetic voice? Perhaps we are offered a clue in the fourth and final section of the poem.
The plant from Seventh Avenue
sits on the Ninth Street sill.
Leaves, at the florist’s shining green,
