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The Pedestal Magazine > Archives > Issue 56 > Reviews >Helen Losse's Better with Friends

Better with Friends
Helen Losse
Rank Stranger Press
ISBN Number: 9781599481951

Reviewer: Janelle Adsit


          Helen Losse’s Better with Friends fearlessly takes an outlook that some would find fatuous. The collection resists postmodernity and remains committed to order, rightness, wisdom, spirit, beauty, and faith. She is unembarrassed and relentless in her search for universal truth, for “a word that transcends all difference/ and puts my feet on solid ground.”

          As indicated by the collection’s title, Losse is a relational poet. Many poems are dedicated to others, and many are elegies. She writes with an explicit communicative purpose: She intends that her audience will be better off from having read. And she’s likely to reach a wide audience; her writing is accessible while remaining complex. She offers compellingly rendered scenes in a straightforward style. A turn from recent trends in literature, this book trusts language to reveal the world. But Losse understands that language must be renewed. She finds the previously unheard way of telling it while making use of an everyday lexicon.

          This first full-length collection from Losse, which follows two chapbooks, is wakeful. Losse is alert to what surrounds her and probes what is hidden in near darkness. In a disarmingly personal style, Losse describes her days without a veil. Loss and longing are apparent. The poet is interested in what she and others have lived through. And the book’s most stirring moments arise from her ability to reproduce a scene as it was perceived. “Just Before the Dawning” is one of the strongest poems in the book because the sense of it is conveyed in details rather than explained in summary.
The nurse, who speaks in staccato whispers,
fingers blond strands of blood-soaked hair.
We remember last night’s storm:

The slicing wind, the freezing rain,
my two gloved hands holding hat to head, coat
to shivering torso.

Having left holiday plans behind—
even December’s bell ringers
with their hungry red cauldrons—

we have shed most of our meaningless baggage,
keeping only a book of puzzles and a light blue
umbrella. We remember ice hitting glass.
          She attends to the particulars of scenes both in and out of doors. She considers blueberry bushes, measures the height of the flowers growing by the railway. Losse is a poet who is well acquainted with the natural world: “I spot a log in the water, felled, perhaps,/ by the congregated beavers.” For Losse, emotion and environment have a reciprocal relationship, one coloring the other. Weather is a form of expression, and earth-dwellers can speak back.

          Losse could capitalize more on her observations, thereby relying less on personification. Phrases such as “the sky is angry” and “the fog is dancing” (a line that is repeated in multiple poems) make less of an impression than Losse’s unadorned images, such as “The once-trapped raindrops/ began descending from moving branches/ in silver-bullet cascades.”

          Taken as a whole, the book is a bit uneven. It is well structured, each poem clicking surely into the next. But there are superfluous elements, redundancies such as “the fog had enveloped, wrapping us in.” There are saccharine lines: “Flowering/ Cherry-petals become springtime confetti./ The angel wears, on her cheek, tiny droplets of rain.” Too often in this collection, tears become the de facto way of describing water droplets. The words “heart” and “hope” are overused.

          Another low point in the book is the poem “Church, When They Had No Piano.” Here, Losse attempts to recreate the backbeat of Howard Grimes, a Memphis blues and R&B musician. But the poem sounds like the lyrics to a worship song for children’s church: “Stomp with your feet. Clap with your hands./ Praise be to God/ with the stomping of the feet.” It juts out awkwardly in the series.

          What saves the collection is Losse’s open-eyed approach to naming the world. Christianity influences Losse’s viewpoint, but this faith resides amidst a recognition of the world's bigotry, violence, and horror. Hurricane Katrina, Rosa Park’s and Corretta Scott King’s deaths, and extreme poverty are all among Losse’s subjects. Although her faith endures even in the presence of the horrific, Losse also accepts that, at least in some instances, “it appears that God is not at home.” This is the conclusion of “On the Other Side of the River.” In this poem, Losse adds to a long list of personas for God.
God lives
on the opposite side of the river,

stands on the cliff
near a tree-covered gorge,

charges past slippery rocks
into slime that looks like moss.

The river’s wide
with turbulent rapids.

Some, below in the water,
have enough buoyancy to float.

Not many.
          Given this poem and others, Losse certainly cannot be described as a Pollyanna. Losse’s work is occasionally bleak, yet overly optimistic platitudes do remain: “even in the darkness, we are never alone.” This cliché is entered into the collection and is not reconciled with other references to God’s apparent absence. Moral overtures such as this can become tedious and trite. In these instances, when Losse does sermonize, she does so intentionally. Her theory of poetry requires it: “What good are words,” Losse writes, “if they debar us of hope,/ offer lessons sown without peace and watered/ without love?”

          The poem “Thrown Out” is an explicit call for rebirth. “We seek peace in a mirror. And looking,/ when we should have been listening,// missed prophetic thunder.” Certainly, the moral of this poem is on its surface, but Losse has admirably attempted to place it in new terms. In these moments, Losse testifies to what poetry can bring to Christianity.

          For Losse, “a chapbook [is] to a book/ what a poem is to a prayer.” Although it may not be as grand as a prayer spoken with clasped hands, the book is a form of supplication nonetheless. Losse seeks to improve, to edify, and to renew. Come to the book for a prayer at an opened window—Losse will be heard and the world outside will be seen.

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