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WORK TITLE: Round Lake
WORK NOTES:
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BIRTHDATE:
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NATIONALITY: American
https://fourwaybooks.com/site/grace-bonner/ * https://fourwaybooks.com/site/grace-bonner/ * http://therumpus.net/2017/02/round-lake-by-grace-bonner/
RESEARCHER NOTES: A MEMOIR TITLED GHOST TRACKS WAS MENTIONED IN PROFILE BUT I COULD FIND NO REFERENCE TO A PUBLISHED BOOK BY AUTHOR TITLED GHOST TRACKS.–DP
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Sarah Lawrence College, B.A.; Columbia University, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, poet, and educator. 92Y Poetry Center, New York, NY, former director; taught English and creative writing at the Pierrepont School, Rutherford, NJ, and abroad; mentor in PEN’s Prison Writing Program.
AWARDS:
MacDowell fellow.
WRITINGS
Contributes poetry to periodicals, including the New Republic, Paris Review, Parnassus, Poetry Daily, and Southampton Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Grace Bonner is a writer and poet. Her first book of poetry, Round Lake, is a collection of intimate poems that deal with death, romantic love, and the need to create a sense of home, not only through family but also through art. The collection’s title refers to a Sumerian theory of the universe surrounded by water. In three poems, Bonner also refers to Round Lake as a New York village. Briana Shemroske, writing for Booklist, noted that throughout Round Lake “this amalgamation of the ancient and modern, the extraordinary and mundane, the divine and irreverent endlessly echoes.” Rumpus Web site contributor Edward Derby remarked: “Bonner’s poems dwell near lakes like ‘Round Lake, NY,’ a poem in three parts, each part of which heads up the book’s three sections.”
In a poem titled “Stopping on Delos,” Bonner begins with the lines “I climb a hill / to the temple / of Isis. / Her missing face / looks out / to sea.” She ends the poem with “Stub-thumb / of an ancient / child. Pagan / mother, take / my hand—tiny, / unsculpted, living. In an article on the Poetry Society of America website, Bonner commented on the poem, noting that in 2008 she was living in Paros, Greece, and was an artist-in-residence at the Aegean Center for Fine Arts. When she returned to America, she wrote the first draft of the poem. Bonner noted in the Poetry Society of America website article: “I was haunted by the beautiful statue I’d seen on Delos. I was also haunted by my sister, who’d attempted suicide the previous year.” Bonner went on to later note: “‘Stopping on Delos’ was inspired by something I saw and felt on a day-trip with a group of art students, but it took five years to write and edit it to completion.”
Several of Bonner’s poems in Round Lake are elegies focusing on her family. She includes poems about a sibling’s drug addiction and the death of her father, who had cancer, and her mother, who committed suicide. For example, in the poem titled “Elegy,” Bonner writes about her mother’s death while calling on the Greek goddess of water, Thetis. In another poem titled “Mother Last June,” Bonner writes: “I have circled our yard, calling her name. / And the stream paces like a lion caged near fire.”
“Bonner’s haunting, intimate poetry functions as a cathartic outlet and serves as a comforting map of emotions,” wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor. Rumpus contributor Derby noted that the poems also contain some humor and wrote: “The book is a node. Call it funny, call it serious, call Siri, and call your sister.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, September 15, 2016, Briana Shemroske, review of Round Lake, p. 12.
Publishers Weekly, September 19, 2016, review of Round Lake, p. 49.
ONLINE
Poetry Society of America Website, https://www.poetrysociety.org/ (June 26, 2017), Grace Bonner, “Grace Bonner on ‘Stopping on Delos.’”
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (February 24, 2017), Edward Derby, review of Round Lake.
Grace Bonner holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University and a BA from Sarah Lawrence College. Round Lake is her first book of poetry. She is a MacDowell fellow, and the former Director of the 92Y Poetry Center. She has taught English and Creative Writing at the Pierrepont School and abroad. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, The Paris Review, Parnassus, Poetry Daily, The Southampton Review and other publications. Her memoir, Ghost Tracks, is about inheritance, sibling rivalry, mental illness, and how the American prison-industrial complex stretched one fragile family to its breaking point. She is a mentor in PEN’s Prison Writing Program.
Round Lake
263.38 (Sept. 19, 2016): p49.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Round Lake
Grace Bonner. Four Way (UPNE, dist.), $15.95 trade paper (80p) ISBN 978-1-935536-74-1
Bonner maps the heartache of fleeting love and the deaths of her sister (drug-induced pancreatic hemorrhage), father (cancer), and mother (suicide) in this plaintive debut collection. The work shines brightest in her ability to illustrate deep grief. Bonner describes the consuming stillness one feels after a tragedy ("I was fitted for this, to exist/ in the liable interstices// between heartbeats"), the fear of moving forward in life alone ("After loss, the heart/ tethers, like a kayak,// to the nearest, fixed body"), and the severe denial that one might acquire in exchange for sanity ("with the phone off, I can pretend/ you might have called"). Although this is a dark collection, Bonner offers light and warmth as she reflects on the dark humor of her mother, the sweet nature of her sister during her sobriety, and the moment she first felt true closeness with her father. Bonner's poems are largely straightforward and unstylized, though they occasionally veer into distracting wordplay. Bonner's haunting, intimate poetry functions as a cathartic outlet and serves as a comforting map of emotions for anyone that has felt unnavigable sorrow: "Every highway has a thousand ghosts,/ and every ghost a thousand exits." (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Round Lake." Publishers Weekly, 19 Sept. 2016, p. 49. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464352710&it=r&asid=ce6eb4a05ccddd7c7d3c9e6d28579e1c. Accessed 30 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A464352710
Round Lake
Briana Shemroske
113.2 (Sept. 15, 2016): p12.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Round Lake. By Grace Bonner. Sept. 2016. 63p. Four Way, paper, $15.95 (9781935536741). 811.
The round lake, Bonner notes, is a Sumerian theory of a universe spawned and surrounded by water. As three eponymous poems suggest, Round Lake is also an enigmatic New York village. This amalgamation of the ancient and modern, the extraordinary and mundane, the divine and irreverent endlessly echoes across each page of Bonners striking debut. In "Landscape with Colossal Kouros," for example, she compares hulking, inscribed statues to the unmarked body of a lover. In "On the Origins of Language," she interweaves the Tower of Babel and Siri, the voice of Apple. And in "Effortless Traveler," a light-reflecting window "move[s] cathedrals down" an unsuspecting train passenger's face. This is a landscape of loss, too, and of water, furious and forgiving, of memories and their ghosts. "Elegy" invokes Thetis, goddess of water, while simultaneously simmering over the gaping loss of a mother. "Song Traversing a Tenebrous World" couples Christian mourning and Bonner's distant sister. In a compelling nod to H. D., Bonner's "Falassarna" conjures "hatche[d] butterflies." This collection is a butterfly in itself, graceful, transformative, soaring. --Briana Shemroske
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Shemroske, Briana. "Round Lake." Booklist, 15 Sept. 2016, p. 12. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464980773&it=r&asid=e4b81ee4e45d3f73d555880e63ca9c33. Accessed 30 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A464980773
Round Lake by Grace Bonner
Reviewed By Edward Derby
February 24th, 2017
I was preparing to cartop my rowing shell after an outing on Oregon’s Lost Lake when Grace Bonner appeared on the shoreline trail in the company of the poet Amanda Turner, with whom I once read the slush pile at Poetry Northwest. This chance introduction opened my ears to listen for Bonner’s poetry, and I picked up snatches of it in the The Hopkins Review and The Brooklyn Quarterly, but I had to wait two years for her first book of poetry, Round Lake. What I learned of Bonner in our conversation opened the door to her book for me: one interested in lakes and the company of other poets and artists.
Bonner’s poems dwell near lakes like “Round Lake, NY,” a poem in three parts, each part of which heads up the book’s three sections; Fingerbone Lake from the novel Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, which is suggested by lines like “this snow is dancing / on a lake / where everybody / drowns,” ; and a round lake from a Sumerian origin myth, of which Bonner says in the notes, “…the universe was engendered from, and surrounded by, water. From within, the world appeared to be a round lake.” These poems walk in the company of Thomas Hardy, John Donne, Brenda Shaughnessy, H.D., and other poets, all of whom are cited in the notes. It’s hard not to infer the influence of many more poets, knowing of Bonner’s past work as the Director of the 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center.
If not along the shore of a lake, one might meet Bonner in a gallery. These poems offer ekphrastic discoveries of works from many genres of art. “Anemone” speaks to a J.M.W. Turner painting, “Peace–Burial at Sea.” In “Landscape with Colossal Kouros,” “…another night in the arms of a man/ who cannot love me” is juxtaposed with a nude male sculpture. A Velvet Underground song, “Heroin,” informs “Poem for Jesus’s Son,” and an experimental short film, “Mothlight,” with its flickering ashen imagery, is invoked as the title of a poem that describes taking “What’s left of you” to New Mexico to inhabit a “new room” with “walls of stars.” The manner in which Bonner interprets art, always finding the personal in it, suggests ekphrasis as a sort of formal constraint that blows open personal insight.
Round Lake is dedicated to Bonner’s mother and sister, whose deaths drive many of the poems. If “Mothlight” waits to be read behind a door labeled “Grief and Acceptance,” then Bonner’s book presents a ring of keys to other doors leading off the same hallway, doors which might be labeled “Spirituality,” “Journeys,” and “Comic Relief.”
In Hamlet, we laugh when the prince asks, “Whose grave’s this, sirrah?” and the gravedigger puns, “Mine, Sir,” even as we anticipate Hamlet’s horror when he learns it is Ophelia’s. Bonner similarly delights us with her verbal hijinks, as in “Faerie Child”:
Lately,
I have glimpsed
a fabulous sea quince
in sequins;
sometimes two
or three sea quinces
in sequence;
and paid
no consequence.
But, all laughter gone, she throws us in the dirt in a later poem, “Mother Last June,” where “I have circled our yard, calling her name. / And the stream paces like a lion caged near fire.”
The humor does its work to heighten the horror that follows. In “Mother Last June,” the engagement with loss in an emotional landscape invites one of many comparisons to Marilynne Robinson. In Robinson’s novel, Housekeeping, the narrator’s mother suicides and a sister is lost forever, all beside, and in, a massive lake that floods archetypally and threatens to give up its dead. Bonner’s book might be read as a companion piece to Housekeeping, so thoroughly do the two seem thematically linked. Simone Weil loans the title “Gravity and Grace” to a poem, and joins Robinson among the wise, strong women that Bonner invokes and seeks.
The arc of the collection bends toward an uneasy search. The book opens with an “Incantation” that anticipates the book’s lost sister, a sojourn in Greece, which serves as a setting for many of the poems, the death of the mother, and finally a new “mother” emerging—one that guides and protects, “protect me mother heart a serpent must be charmed… .” In the final poem of the book, Bonner appeals to the ancient Egyptian Goddess Isis, “Pagan / mother, take / my hand–tiny, / unsculpted, living,” elevating the search for a spiritual mother that includes Robinson and Weil; for this is also a book that wrestles with spirituality in unorthodox terms—“Now pack up your religions”—much as Robinson and Weil do.
If the poems in this book are charms against “a serpent in the heart,” like the one that takes the sister, then the book is a bedside grimoire for use in an uncaring world. God appears present but distant, as in “Playing Bach” where “God is more meticulous/ than kind” or in “Elegy” where “We laughed/ at God’s unsubtle billboard: You think/ it’s hot here?” In the Weil-inspired “Gravity and Grace,” Bonner writes, “I have heard her mistake a car service operator / for a God who cares. / Would someone please come, / would someone please come to deliver me—“ this in a poem in which God is a typo. In another, God is a “Marksman, Flourishing.” Deliverance in these poems is both a joke and a threat.
The poems transcend when the musically and verbally playful combine with serious subject matter, as in “Unnerving Groundcover”: “Chrysanthemum poison must be extracted / before the petals are steeped for tea. / And so our love is like surgery… .” And later, “Lamb’s Ears may bandage wounds. / Don’t come back, motherwort.” But sometimes Bonner appears overly seduced by twenty-dollar adjectives that serve the aural needs of the poem, but distract from an otherwise plain-spoken purpose. One example is the title “Spectacular Crepuscular,” with a heavy question lurking below, “What besides heat / makes you eternal?” We see this tendency again in “Song Traversing a Tenebrous World,” which asks, “People mourn / as though a villager has died. / Was it you sister?” The departed sister keeps appearing in the poem even “in seine nets.” I trust the world the poem constructs to be tenebrous without being told as much in the title. The line between comic and tragic is thin, and Bonner walks it soberly most of the time. Ultimately, she manages to evoke the “Thin Place” of a poem, which Bonner defines in the notes as “… a Pagan Celtic term, later adopted by Christians, for a mesmerizing place or state of being in which one feels close to the divine.” The book examines the wish to be close to the divine, invites it even, but ultimately can’t commit.
If the book is non-committal about lovers, family, children, God,—even, at first—life, then it wrestles with the biggest questions. It looks for answers in art, in incantation and in song, which is the best province of poetry. In Bonner, it’s a Greek province. Reading Round Lake, I was drawn into a vortex of connections and new vocabulary, old Greek and modern Greece, more than happy to look up “chthonic” or to link on the QR code on the book’s back cover and find a video of a rainy back porch with the words of “Sunken Table” appearing, then a fleeting shot of the poet smoking a cigarette. The book is a node. Call it funny, call it serious, call Siri, and call your sister.
***
Grace Bonner on "Stopping on Delos"
STOPPING ON DELOS
I climb a hill
to the temple
of Isis.
Her missing face
looks out
to sea.
All her dreams
are nautical.
Poppies enfold
her granite
pedestal.
A bump, a burr,
a barnacle
flecked with red
paint, clings to
her waist.
Stub-thumb
of an ancient
child. Pagan
mother, take
my hand—tiny,
unsculpted, living.
August 2013
On "Stopping on Delos"
This poem's origins go back to April 2008, when I was living in Paros, Greece, and had the privilege of being an artist-in-residence with a travel stipend at the Aegean Center for Fine Arts. Books I carried with me at that time included H.D.'s The Walls Do Not Fall, Elizabeth Bishop's Questions of Travel and Louise Gluck's The Wild Iris. A few months after my return, I typed a first draft of a poem:
Anamnesis
Delos
Gulls swarm.
Fish at the top
of our wake.
I keep thinking of her hand.
Three fingers remain of her right,
wrapped around her splendid, white-robed waist.
Left breast, full pitcher.
Headless, alone
in a field of wildflowers run
rampant in what was her home.
We celebrate a seventy-fifth birthday
with a bountiful taverna meal.
In the evening, the ferry lurches sickeningly.
Marion says her niece is thirty-one
and dying of cancer, gone to her liver.
My sister is the same age, doesn't want life.
One side of the ferry cuts
sunset water, rippling like the folds
of her robe.
The other is midnight blue,
her dress at Dawn.
Granite, limestone.
Red poppies—in wind,
in mind.
Of course I was haunted by the beautiful statue I'd seen on Delos. I was also haunted by my sister, who'd attempted suicide the previous year. Merriam-Webster defines anamnesis as "a recalling to mind." Its opposite is amnesia. Interestingly, for the case of my sister, the second definition of anamnesis is "a preliminary case history of a medical or psychiatric patient." When I started writing "Anamnesis," I couldn't have known that my mother would die within a week. I hid the poem in a drawer.
Two years later, I was able to read some of my old writing without cringing. I found "Anamnesis" in a folder, and saw that my travels in Greece had triggered memories of poems I'd loved as a teenager. I recognized the statue's "Left breast, full pitcher" from one of my favorite poems that I'd read and memorized in high school—Sylvia Plath's "Edge":
Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little
Pitcher of milk, now empty.
Other images in my poem—the "poppies," and maybe even the "folds"—were also rooted in Plath. Encouraged, I decided to rewrite it.
With the help of a photograph I'd taken on Delos, I saw again the primary image of the statue in the field, and realized that she was not alone, as I'd originally believed. This was a critical discovery. Unless the statue had been modeled on a Byzantine contortionist, the fingers at her waist couldn't possibly have been her own. The missing hand must have belonged to her absent child.
I rewrote a three-page version of "Anamnesis," bringing in new images, settings and voices, including those of my sister—for whom I was grieving—and Emily Dickinson and John Berryman, taking care to put the pilfered words in italics. This second draft is broken into five parts—like a mosaic, or a floral bouquet scattered on the floor of some palace. It alternates between my own perspective, and what I imagined might have been my mother's and sister's points of view at the moments of their deaths. But it was impossible to imagine such things, and unbearable to try. The heart of the poem can be seen in the following section from the second draft. I've highlighted words and phrases that made it into the published version:
Amanesis
Delos
Gulls swarm.
Fish at the top
of our wake.
A ferry to the sacred
island of statues
cuts sunlit water
like an expert dressmaker.
I find Isis, headless,
alone in a field
home to rampant
wildflowers.
Three small fingers
and flecks of red paint
cling to the goddess's robe
at her waist.
Shoulders and neck show
her face turned away.
Bad mother.
Dumb sister,
she can't see you.
[…]
red poppies tremble
in wind, in mind.
[…]
Two years later, I saw that my poem didn't need other people's voices. I got my chisel and hacked away at the ugliest lines ("Shoulders and neck show her face turned away"—so clinical!) until I saw my statue's face, and knew what she dreamed:
Her missing face looks out to sea.
All her dreams are nautical.
I wrote a better title, combining the island's name with the idea of a brief visit/visitation, as well as with the sense of completing something. I brought my speaker back at the poem's end, where she addresses the statue as her mother. I sent the poem to Henri Cole at The New Republic. He helped me to tinker with it some more—and to discover my "pagan" mother in Plath—and thrilled me by publishing it.
"Stopping on Delos" was inspired by something I saw and felt on a day-trip with a group of art students, but it took five years to write and edit it to completion. I don't think most poems need to take half a decade in the writing, but this one marks a years-long emotional transformation. Like the child's fingers in the statue, my mother's and sister's traces couldn't be eradicated from the poem; mother and child are ultimately inseparable.