In her new collection of poems, “Valentines and Other Tragedies,” poet and former Martha’s Vineyard seasonal resident Rachel Baird contradicts the sweeter sides of love with a darker, less sentimental view of romance.
The Feb. 14 holiday Valentine’s Day began simply as a saint’s day, but by the time Geoffrey Chaucer was penning “The Canterbury Tales” in the Middle Ages, and courtly love came into fashion, sending tokens of love — elaborate valentine cards in particular, and valentine keys — to one’s inamorato/a, the holiday had turned into an occasion for romance. Valentine keys were in the news recently in Paris, when the Pont des Arts pedestrian bridge was covered with 45 tons of lovers’ locks, the keys to 700,000 of which lay below in the Seine River.
Ms. Baird’s view of valentines differs. Poems like “all this time I lay in your arms,” which starts the section titled “Valentines,” explore the sensual side of love, and tie it to the natural world, where “In dark the fawns sleep.” Even when love is celebrated, the prospect of separation often lurks in the shadows. At other times, the poet conflates herself with nature, as when she describes herself and her putative lover as “Us, the walking trees with red stained-lips,” in “the heart.”
Ms. Baird has a knack for bringing the reader up close to the love object. In “another,” she begins with “The taut corner/Where your lip curls,” and describes “the soft noise of your voice in my ear” in “go ahead.” In “landscape,” she writes, “The landscape of your softened face” becomes “A mouthful of heaven.” Loss is the motif, however, in “going west,” with “nothing left but trails of song,” and “All the spent days/ I cannot gather back” in “spent.”
In “Other Tragedies,” the second 25 poems in Ms. Baird’s collection, the poet prepares the reader for battle, asking, “Who will end up bloodied?” in “amor.” Yet love can still provide consolation, and she closes “nightfall” with the reminder that “Each other is all we have.” The same physical intimacy that characterizes the work in “Valentines” appears in “Other Tragedies.” Exploring the connections between passing clouds and the pain of love’s disappointments, “night and day” suggests “Synapses fire up an electrical storm,/ Frontal cortex recollections/ Forming void of course.”
Missing most often from these poems are narrative and declarative exposition, so it comes as a surprise when “wailing across my white stone flesh” begins with the simple statement, “I still cry when I am sad,” and later continues with “And who we care for, we make them cry, too.” Midway through this poem the narrator declares, “My first ten years were full of rain.” Occasional grammatical lapses like “Laying down in the tall grass of Colorado” suggest that “Valentines and Other Tragedies” might have benefited from more rigorous editing, but readers will find themselves savoring the poet’s gift for joining unusual and unexpected images.
