Gregory Ramkawsky. The Broom Tree: Poems. Unsolicited Press, 2023. Reviewed by Gabriel Antonio Reed, Jan. 18, 2024.
In his “Afterward” Gregory Ramkawsky leaves the reader with a meditation on the central image of The Broom Tree⎯the place where the prophet Elijah, after a failure and epiphany, asked God to take his life. It is actually misleading to describe the broom tree as this amazing book’s central image; a better word is inclusio, a frame for the heart of The Broom Tree. Elijah’s tree is a space in which God speaks to the prophet and feeds him, prepares him not to die there but to arise and return to his work. Likewise, the heart of this book, through a poetics of radical empathy, creates that space for the reader.
The tension animating The Broom Tree is that of belonging and not-belonging. Ramkawsky traces a liminal space, a moment; this is a book dwelling in hopelessness but insisting in its next breath on hope. In “Barely Literate,” for instance, the speaker, looking over a bridge and remembering moments from childhood of solitude and pain crafts scenes with such delicate and clear beauty they take the breath:
And solitude,
. . . .
Was like the cake
I could never
Bring to school
Because I have
A summer birthday . . . (22)
These places become real through tender attention; we feel the speaker’s sense of embodying those places. But Ramkawsky’s attention to discarded, unnoticed, or broken places and objects conveys, in a poem like “Constitution,” the sense of not-belonging: “Downcast eyes in the public square, / I do not belong anywhere” (18). That closing couplet shocks us with its restlessness but also the emergence of the speaking subject after a litany of objects: “Timberland without a sole, / Sunlight to a sightless mole.” The list becomes a quest for self-definition that ends, finally, in the confession of not-belonging.
Ramkawsky’s performance of the liminal⎯through images as in the poems above, or through restless formal play, as in “14,” in which the layered text mimics a shaking hand, or the closing contrapuntal in “Black Holes,”⎯figures a deeper poetic logic, that of radical empathy. The space he creates includes also a communion of experiences, lived alongside others, and so other voices emerge, other perspectives in formal conversation on the page. “Struggle,” for instance, subverts the form of the dialogue in the tradition of Job. Some poems here name people they are written for, though every poem in The Broom Tree feels like a space prepared for another. One of the most touching gestures in the entire collection is in “In Progress,” where Ramkawsky gives the page to another speaker to dwell in a broken space. The allusions throughout the collection, likewise, feel like signposts, parallel experiences that dress the landscape, and their full formal realization shines in the final poem, “Beyond Beersheba,” in the section entitled “I Am.” Here the speaker is within, and also beyond, the story of the broom tree, and says, “I am afraid of what I am, / And I am afraid to face / All that I am not” (72). The amazing paradox of this book is that Ramkawsky has prepared a space between belonging and not-belonging, a landscape so otherworldly it can only be real and present. To belong in The Broom Tree is to belong nowhere but there.
I opened this review by mentioning Ramkawsky’s “Afterward,” which is a play on the genre of the afterword. In his closing gesture, Ramkawsky reminds us of the story of the broom tree. For all our time in that space of belonging and not-belonging, we must return to our lives and to our work. The promise of this book is of a life afterward, a hope within and beyond the solitude, the hopelessness. Ramkawsky’s mind is here on every page, but his heart will stay with the reader, will return with the reader. From “On Attending a Writing Workshop Redux”:
Is there still a hope to live for?
I want there to be.
I want it for everyone else,
So why not for me?
. . . .
My heart reminded me
We have to keep fighting.
If I die, let me die
. . . .
I’ll keep writing.
In his “Afterward” Gregory Ramkawsky leaves the reader with a meditation on the central image of The Broom Tree⎯the place where the prophet Elijah, after a failure and epiphany, asked God to take his life. It is actually misleading to describe the broom tree as this amazing book’s central image; a better word is inclusio, a frame for the heart of The Broom Tree. Elijah’s tree is a space in which God speaks to the prophet and feeds him, prepares him not to die there but to arise and return to his work. Likewise, the heart of this book, through a poetics of radical empathy, creates that space for the reader.
The tension animating The Broom Tree is that of belonging and not-belonging. Ramkawsky traces a liminal space, a moment; this is a book dwelling in hopelessness but insisting in its next breath on hope. In “Barely Literate,” for instance, the speaker, looking over a bridge and remembering moments from childhood of solitude and pain crafts scenes with such delicate and clear beauty they take the breath:
And solitude,
. . . .
Was like the cake
I could never
Bring to school
Because I have
A summer birthday . . . (22)
These places become real through tender attention; we feel the speaker’s sense of embodying those places. But Ramkawsky’s attention to discarded, unnoticed, or broken places and objects conveys, in a poem like “Constitution,” the sense of not-belonging: “Downcast eyes in the public square, / I do not belong anywhere” (18). That closing couplet shocks us with its restlessness but also the emergence of the speaking subject after a litany of objects: “Timberland without a sole, / Sunlight to a sightless mole.” The list becomes a quest for self-definition that ends, finally, in the confession of not-belonging.
Ramkawsky’s performance of the liminal⎯through images as in the poems above, or through restless formal play, as in “14,” in which the layered text mimics a shaking hand, or the closing contrapuntal in “Black Holes,”⎯figures a deeper poetic logic, that of radical empathy. The space he creates includes also a communion of experiences, lived alongside others, and so other voices emerge, other perspectives in formal conversation on the page. “Struggle,” for instance, subverts the form of the dialogue in the tradition of Job. Some poems here name people they are written for, though every poem in The Broom Tree feels like a space prepared for another. One of the most touching gestures in the entire collection is in “In Progress,” where Ramkawsky gives the page to another speaker to dwell in a broken space. The allusions throughout the collection, likewise, feel like signposts, parallel experiences that dress the landscape, and their full formal realization shines in the final poem, “Beyond Beersheba,” in the section entitled “I Am.” Here the speaker is within, and also beyond, the story of the broom tree, and says, “I am afraid of what I am, / And I am afraid to face / All that I am not” (72). The amazing paradox of this book is that Ramkawsky has prepared a space between belonging and not-belonging, a landscape so otherworldly it can only be real and present. To belong in The Broom Tree is to belong nowhere but there.
I opened this review by mentioning Ramkawsky’s “Afterward,” which is a play on the genre of the afterword. In his closing gesture, Ramkawsky reminds us of the story of the broom tree. For all our time in that space of belonging and not-belonging, we must return to our lives and to our work. The promise of this book is of a life afterward, a hope within and beyond the solitude, the hopelessness. Ramkawsky’s mind is here on every page, but his heart will stay with the reader, will return with the reader. From “On Attending a Writing Workshop Redux”:
Is there still a hope to live for?
I want there to be.
I want it for everyone else,
So why not for me?
. . . .
My heart reminded me
We have to keep fighting.
If I die, let me die
. . . .
I’ll keep writing.