cover image GONE TO EARTH

GONE TO EARTH

Pam Rehm, . . Flood, $10 (50pp) ISBN 978-0-9710059-1-4

Taking its title from British novelist Mary Webb's WWI-era bildungsroman in which a young woman seeks to discover herself amid the pressures of social conventions, Rehm's third collection seeks to carve out a space where the individual has the freedom to make decisions and evaluate them according to a personal set of ethics, beliefs and religious ideas. Written in concise and rigorous one- and two-line stanzas, the poems of Gone to Earth are even more emotionally condensed and intellectually concentrated than those of similar theme and scope in The Garment in Which No One Had Slept (1993) and To Give It Up (1995). Tersely Dickensonian propositions ("What we think is imminent/ is already far behind"; "Nothing is altogether self-ruled"; etc.) are subject to a kind of internalized empiricism, weighed against the dilemmas of possession and being possessed—by others, by oneself and, finally, by language: "The word is my word// The world is my surmise." Inquiry is thus how one "goes to earth." The interaction Rehm sets up between such metaphysical strains and the everyday as political—the personal as political—is an equally engaging problematic, one her work never fully resolves: "Paper money/ and men's perceptions// What is a profit/ and how will it redeem us?" While private in their sensibility and resistant to any particular doctrine, these poems will have readers posing such questions to themselves. (May)

Forecast:A 1994 National Poetry Series award winner, Rehm was a co-editor of the influential mid-'90s literary journal apex of the M. This collection is the first for Flood Editions, a Chicago press cofounded and co-edited by poet and former Chicago Review poetry editor Devin Johnston. Both house and book should garner review attention in the independent media.