The Luster of Everything I'm Already Forgetting by Nicole Rollender Reviewed by James Diaz

              "holy my wet / orchard of abandoned belongings /  let me feed the needy / with fruit / at least unlatch / my tongue & feed it to a child" thus begins Rollender's powerful book of poems that often reads like equal parts liturgy, prayer, and humble offering to those who need shared light and comfort most. By no accident does Rollender write of feeding some holy pieces of hope to a child. As a mother, Rollender knows well the daunting task of raising children in a land often so cruel and so unforgiving. Forgiveness, another theme that runs like a river though this book. A baptismal dunk into muddy waters, these struggling souls that rise up clean and renewed. And who can offer us this but some unknown, unseen higher power? 

​"Love doesn’t want this body. A sparrow’s in the tree, / then he’s gone—chasing steeples." The iconography of worship is threaded throughout this beautiful prayer-hum of a book, and the pain of the all-too-human hell we put our most vulnerable through: "When another child suicide bomber blows up by remote control. Tell me, is there a different word (or world) / for light or lonely in the darkening? Is light ever alone?" Is such light ever alone? What/who accompanies us in the brutal darkening? But would that there one day come to us all such days of gentle mercy, of higher ground, of prayers heard even if not always, or ever, answered. Do not the secular of us yearn also for such a merciful touch from some sort of (we know not what) call it, but just this feeling to be held gently in the open valley of healing and forgiveness. 

In "How I Learned to Pray" Rollender writes of a hard scrabbled, inborn faith: 

"God dwells among the pots & pans, I learned the hard way
Grandmother’s kitchen toil to save electricity, oil lamps
hands’ litany in suds how inconsequential to scrape
chicken grease with my nails each plate & tine a reminder we
fed the family tooth grind & heel"

Those: "differences between what / you remember & what’s there", haunt and hint at the seeds of a deeper faith. Hard won, not easily handed down. What kind of faith is easily given? Not one worth the name. The poet, like Jacob, wrestles with the angel in the dead of night. This is true faith, not orthodox faith, but faith down in the mud, deep in the valley, across the rushing wild river, a last ditch effort to pocket some sort of hope and holy through the howl and hurt of this world. 

"The sound
of day’s end,
it’s only my son praying. Even now the prayer knocks.
Wake me when. When I’ve arrived."

Poetry seems the most fitting vehicle of such prayers. Because what is a poem if not a kind of prayer? And what is a prayer if not poetry's unseen breath? Rollender knows it takes faith just to get through a single day. How to protect and shelter our beloveds in a golden and forgiving light? Faith, surely, a wild  and  ever wandering and wondering faith. Worth the name; it is called struggle. This then is a book of struggling faith. Of human hands put to pain, of "lord, help me make it through the night." And my children, and my children's children, and all the children of the world. What kind of world is this that demands it be gifted brutally, and not softly? What kind of world?

"The Luster of Everything I'm Already Forgetting" lives true to that gentle sheen, that soft glow, that resides in the heartlands of us, one and all. This is a rich and rewarding book to be sat with for a while, and whose questions linger in the air long after the closing of its final, hallowed-human pages.



The Luster of Everything I'm Already Forgetting is available now from Kelsay Books.
​