Reading a Life – Torohill, by Donna Reis

by John M Bellinger

Chapbook Editor, The Comstock Review

Reading poetry as an editor, you tend to look at a lot of things that seem to carry importance in poetry – the line, the structure, the consistency of metaphor, the music that a poem uses to carry you along. What you don’t often find is the person in there, it is mostly the technique that drives the piece along, makes it succeed or fail.

That is what makes reading a chapbook a more challenging, and yet fulfilling experience. It is the central idea that is found there, sometimes shouted, and sometimes gently teased around your ears with anecdotes, ideas, and recipes for living. What you find in there is someone that you hopefully get to know a little better, a friend whose eyes you can see through that seems to see through yours. 

In Torohill, Donna Reis starts with shoes. A simple group of objects that infuse this book, not with so much loss, as with longing, …searching for their mates…so still,/still there. (“Shoes”). 

From that shattered beginning, the author takes us through a life of humor and loss, from putting on a dress over a fractured pelvis (“Mexican Standoff”) to an acquaintance’s adulterous dive out a screen window (“Screening”) to a hilarious little piece about Andrew Cuomo “What do you say, my Captain, my Excelsior?” (“Excelsio”). 

But always we feel loss here, lost forwarding addresses, lost boyfriends, lost people along the way. It is the language of the survivor.  This is the person we are presented with this book, a poet surviving with grace and the long humor of the well lived life. 

It is no simple matter coming to the end of this book, and your breath seems to stop with the heartless humanity of “The Last Night” – When I awoke/he was gone. It is the miracle of the last poems and the Epilogue that almost catch you off guard with their beauty and understated loneliness. It is these things that Ms. Reis has been driving us toward: The clinical, the pure, the heart-etched language of the poet. Sometimes I’m jealous/you went first, as I tie//your loose ends (“Answering Machine”). When I find you, I’m certain/ you’ve left, seeing only parched/grass and a marker (You’ve Left). It is this last section where the author comes most into her own, in a lyrical and elegiac suite of poems regarding her husband’s death. 

I read and reviewed a book of the author some ten years ago, and she asked me to read this book, as she says, or said back then, “I get her.” And I do get her, and I hope she finds that I still get her. 

An invitation to read work by a promising poet is one of the happiest chores I know, and to read again that poet after ten long years is not something that should ever be taken as less than a gift.

And so I leave to you, dear reader, a gift of advice. Read this book and get to know the author. You will not regret it. It is not an easy pill to swallow, but life is never easy. The best we can do with what we have survived is to recall it with grace and humor. And longing. To live is to lose, and to lose is to long. It may not be ours to cling to these things, but it will always be our place to honor and remember what is gone, and to move ahead into the future with our person, or our poet, intact.  We wound, but we heal. We long, but we long most of all to share moments.

Please, come and share Torohill.