Transfer of qualities /

Ronk's 10th collection takes as its central tenet the idea that people and objects engage in a deep kind of transference. That is, in any interaction with a thing, a person's desires and thoughts are imprinted on the thing, and some aspects of the thing rub off on the person. This thesis of sorts is established at first with small prose poems that take their cues from Stein's Tender Buttons, poems titled "The Cup," "The Folded Muslin," "Corroded Metal." But the association with Stein stops there: "We wonder what, if anything, objects want, if our rearranging satisfies some hidden need not only of ours but of theirs. Things found in the gutter and rescued, we say, are given another life, but as what-to be looked at, handled, to be made into what one wills." Ronk's collection of "various objects," books, photograms, people and portraits dominate the collection, which moves from prose to lineated poems, to essays, to brief passages of nonfiction, seguing into topics of representation, death, mourning, love, and intimacy with the physical world. ".breakable bowls, plates, pitchers, and vases. If a piece is old and it has been broken and mended, its fragility exposed by means of glue and cracks, it seems ever more profoundly touched by the sensual and uncanny." (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

"Nothing has an essence of its own, but is what it is only in relation to all that is around," writes Ronk (English, Occidental Coll.), winner of a PEN USA Award for In a Landscape of Having To Repeat. Her new collection is philosophical, asserting that people have no individual identity: they are shape-shifting entities composed of objects beside them, things that continuously affect their essence-which isn't an essence at all. Rather, it's an existence, and one constantly in flux. The collection includes poems, prose poems, and short reflections that resemble snapshots of those changes, illustrating the transfer that occurs between people, objects, and ideas, as is suggested by the book's title (taken from The Sacred Fount by Henry James). "People and even things are changed by what they touch," says Ronk, "just as cool objects can turn the skin cool." True, maybe. VERDICT Told as interior monologs, these are language poems about objects like streetlights and paperclips. Ronk uses few metaphors and instead relies on surrealistic musings which, although engaging in their own right, do not necessarily make this a strong collection of poetry.-C. Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., MD (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.