The Spaces Between Knowing and Understanding

 review of Renée M. Sgroi, In a Tension of Leaves and Binding, Guernica Editions, Toronto, 2024

Connecting grief with nature resonates with me because after my wife Evelyn died in her 40s I went camping in Yosemite throughout the two years after, and nature taught me how to take in and understand my grief. Renée M. Sgroi also pairs nature with grief in her elegant and evocative book of poetry. She finds parallel stories between the lives of people and the lives of plants and animals of wanting, loneliness, loss, and being bound together.

The poems are not like/as comparisons between the two worlds because the images and voices flow into each other as equals. There is much I could say about every poem, especially the profound title poem that speaks of tension and binding, of the parts of a book being assembled from plants and bark and held together in the tension of binding, the binding of a mother and daughter through blood and the birth canal, and that all things that are bound eventually fall apart, even the decay of paper in a book as it lets go. Change is the nature of every life and every relationship. We are born and die, we fall in love and lose the people we love, we grieve, and we learn to carry the scars of our grief with us as we live on.

Sgroi describes grief accurately. A sampling: “a heart shatters like a blue vase,” and grief is a “rain that soaks deep into the soil.” It is an onion that returns the following year on its own, as grief returns unbidden with memories, images of a human iris, and we’re left with “a field of scars the body can’t relinquish.” “grief//is sensed in colognes wafting/from darkly-dressed handshakes, / in cups of too strong coffee.” “the first time you make tomato sauce, / sense your mother’s absent hands/ in the aroma of tomatoes stewing.”

Scientific names and terms are used throughout, which is delightful and adds intrigue. The descriptions of the classification systems that are used for plants and animals can delude us into thinking we understand the essence of these life forms because we gave them names and traced where they descended from. Yet we don’t understand, and nature continues to break forms and evolve, and trying to put a language box of words around any living creature is still not to say what it is because so much is left out. Sgroi provides vivid images that help us see beneath their skins.

We also try to classify grief, but the language we use is also incapable of saying what it feels like or how it has impacted us on every level of our being. We create lattices of words, a hard framework to hold our raw and traumatic experiences in place long enough for us to find the right words, yet there are holes in the lattice that are alive with mystery as they let light and air come in. 

One of my favorite words in the book is “kerning.” This is the space that exists between the letters in the words on a page. Think of the printed page as a lattice of words lined out either in regular stanzas or spread around the page. Sgroi’s words are trail markers that guide our directions of thought. The space between the words, even the unspoken beneath the words, is where meaning exists. I suspect that each of us who has grieved has felt this inability to speak precisely about the depths we have felt, and we realize that the final meaning we seek will always exist unspoken in the spaces between. In the Celtic tradition, these are the thin places where we feel something larger than what we can see and understand, and they are what we long to experience.

The discussions of nature’s bodies, human bodies, relationships, and words/books/language intermingle – “commas swimming in amniotic fluid,” “illness burdens a soul with stones,” and the moist earth smelling musty like “uterine lining.” There are no divisions between us and nature if we pay close attention and listen. Sgroi does.

The point of view of garden vegetables is explored and helps us see them as living beings and not as things and realize that we live in relationships with them. I won’t look at a cucumber in the same way again; it makes repeated appearances as “Cucumis sativus.” Poems use different forms of expression. “Carrot” has the sounds and cadence of a Biblical psalm. The use of white space is varied as some poems are spread out across the entire white space of a page. A glossary in the back explains the Latin and Italian words.  

Nature reminds us that everything living flows together like river on a journey to one destination. Everything decays, even the words in books, yet in nature we can find the hope we need to cope with our grief. 

I’ve read these poems over and over because they challenge me and each time I see a bit more of how they are interconnected. I don’t think we understand nature or grief until we spend time with them and listen to their voices. Sgroi’s book invites us in to do this.