In a Riptide by Ronna Bloom

Reviewed by Michael Greenstein

French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas bases his theory of ethics on the “face of the other,” a recognition of the other person’s soul and individuality in any meaningful dialogue or encounter. Levinas’s ethical sensibility is present in Ronna Bloom’s poetry where the poet repeatedly faces others through a series of masked and unmasked faces. In her latest collection of poems, her dominant mode of personification gives life to abstract entities. In a Riptide examines and eulogizes society’s wounds and illnesses in four Buddhist sections: sick person, old person, dead person, and happy person with nothing. Her blue mood recurs in “An Excruciating Blue Day,” “The Blue Mark of Fever,” and “Blue Grit.”

Bloom’s introductory poem, “Immeasurable,” is an almost sonnet of thirteen lines that measure the distance between human beings as well as the rhythms of poetry. The first sentence runs over four lines in an initial encounter: “Today a woman of no measurable age stopped me.” She is ageless because she represents the human condition: she asks the poet where she could buy some meat, “and her eyes / filled up with tears when it seemed too far or impossible / and every shop was closed.” In this down-to-earth encounter, a riptide of tearful eyes highlights faces and measures distance and desire. The next sentence gradually shifts to a more poetic mode in the second half: “I could do nothing but stand there, / vibrating in the hesitant spring.” That shimmering phrase of a reluctant season pits motion against stillness, pulsates this face-to-face meeting, and hinges spring into action.

The next sentence hints at a more universal situation beyond these two individuals: “We were just two more / meandering women in the empty street.” The next sentence expands this ocular encounter through its reading of facial features: “Some of us / looking down as though illness could pass through the eyes, / others looking up, sending out our million help-me messages.” An alliterated “million messages” picks up the earlier measurable and “more meandering” as part of a meeting process. “We stood there with nothing obvious passing between us / but time.” This temporal note is a reminder of time in a riptide, with tidal elements associated with lunar cycles. She finds the face between the obvious and the obscure.

The poem’s conclusion draws out this specific meeting to a Buddhist moral that structures the entire collection: “And I thought of the four people the Buddha met in his travels: / sick person, old person, dead person, happy person with nothing. / And I felt like all of them.” The last person with nothing echoes the nothing between the poet and woman of no measurable age, while the four people accompany four seasons and four elements, most notably water that flows through In a Riptide where lives are torn and timeworn.

The first section “To Show the Scars: sick person” opens with “An Excruciating Blue Day.” Couplets in this poem combine the poet and other creatures, beginning with a series of “l” sounds that compose the blue colour: “All April, the one purple pansy clung on / in the hail. It waved its silky elements.” This unique flower lingers and motions its solo show of the season, its elements playing against earth, air, fire, and water. Excruciating reminds us of the crux or cross at its root, which is exhibited in the crossover or chiasmus in many of Bloom’s lines, as well as the crossover of empathy between poet and personalities. She enters into a dialogue with a spider on her ceiling, its “elegant legs” vibrating with “silky elements” in a web of interaction. A shift toward humour: “I don’t speak spider, but tried to coax one from the sink / then gave up and flooded it. Yes, there’s an edge to my voice.” Her vocal edge participates in cadenced conversations – face to face, sideways, and slanted.

Season comes into play: “It’s too cold for the spring I want. My mother asks / when she can see me again, demands a date.” There is a spring to her step, body, and state of mind, the clockwork of dates and moods. In the imperative mood, she prescribes cures:

For anger, take a hit of helium. For bitterness, mimic

the dog’s lolling tongue, then watch his reaction.

Mimicry is also a form of dialogue, and the next couplet serves up some grim cathartic comedy in the bitter truth:

When you find a tumour, ask the barista at Second Cup,

Is there a cancer discount for that?

She concludes with an explanation of her inward chromatic dome with internal rhyme: “I explain: keep staring at the blue sky like it’s your pain, / eventually it will change colour.” And return to a purple pansy and other blueprints.

Another instance of ethical transference, “Vulnerable to” appears in different sections of this collection, metastasizing across pages. The first wound or vulnerability is “Shock,” which begins with edgy words of trauma:

Call me gut-sharked and simped out. I can’t

sleep. I’m a death bucket of news,

lolograssing in my sheets.

This insomniac awakening to bad news is gut-wrenching, filled with fricatives and hard k sounds in sharked and bucket. The shark swims through a riptide of emotions and cancerous displacement. “Her tumour in my earphone yesterday / stopped my leg paddles on the path.” That path may be watery and rip tidal. If “Night and coherence don’t mix,” then we get insomniac incoherence in “a frick / of toast,” a dictionary of myths, a riptide of surrealism, and a resistance to poetic redemption.

The second vulnerability is to “Wonder”: “An x-rayed tumour on a spine.” The x-ray scans the line from face to face, cell to cell, crossing over from tumour to tire, ray to radial: “looks like a wad of gum on a radial tire.” In the realm of personification, “The doctors are called Savage, / Pain, Wonder, and Shepherd.” In the midst of a riptide on land or sea, “There is a causeway, a footbridge. / I stay on my side.” In a chiasmus of caring, the poet sides with others, bridges distances, and slides into empathetic embrace and line breaks: “I hug her but do not break her. / She is your sister too.”

Bloom is also vulnerable to “Ancestry” of pogroms and Holocaust. “I, descendant of those chased from villages and violated / into violence.” She inherits villages, violence, and violation that have “striped me and burned me.” She is vulnerable to fire: “Charred like a train in silence” and “Hung dog in hooded eyes with a fire behind / and the flint in my mouth.” Also vulnerable to sadness, grief, sex, and food. On the one hand, “The mouth of the earth is open”; on the other, “Don’t close the door to the door to the door.” Doors may be nesting dolls to the next room or stanza; opening them may be akin to opening faces for ethical encounters, instead of taking matters at face value.

Vulnerable to “Spirit” revisits riptide: “Descendant of sky water, / plumb line into the nowhere visible below, / but felt through its verging.” Rinsing her senses and sentences, the poet concludes: “I flinch till flensed in sound, no, / in sun darts thrown from elsewhere, coming through / the eyes mouth and heart.” Poetical moment is also a poethical instant as the riptide flenses the face of self and other.

The eponymous phrase, “in a riptide,” appears at the end of the poem, “I used to know,” which contains most of Bloom’s themes – a striving for dialogue, an emotional encounter, and an undertow of subliminal meanings. “I used to know / how to talk to people. I used to feel / the underthing they were feeling, / and have the questions. / Now I don’t know what to ask.” Bloom’s language is spare, stripped of all ornament.

The next stanza carries on in this raw minimalist mode:

I live, like many friends, between urgency

and despondency. I sit with everyone

in the big asklessness, waiting

for birds to fly out of our mouths

full of velocity and direction –

“I” connects with those in a liminal state of in-betweenness leading to the central “asklessness” in the midst of a series of enjambed lines. And after that big word of sounded silence, a surprise of birds in the voice of dialogue and direction to the dash and final stanza and end of sentence:

for the reach of the mind

like an ocean that can’t find the shore

or a shore that can’t find an ocean,

lonely for each other,

in a riptide.

Chiasmus, crossover, and reversal of direction talk to people, fly the birds, and blur interfaces.

“The Future” demonstrates Bloom’s penchant for personification and watery ways. In her dream the poet is seated on a high wall above an open book on the ground:

The sea rose. Be careful of the book! I called.

The water didn’t care. In the dream, I had no boots.

To each her own footwear in the apocalypse.

Her apocalyptic dream personifies water in riptide’s voice: “all we can do is all we can do. / The tide will turn. Fire and water and so on.” Elements turn and burn from the last century to a tense future of eco-poetics and Levinas’s ethics of the present: “Now is the time. Everybody swim.”

“Emotions at Work” personifies abstraction: “Anger and exhaustion walk out together in the old road / in the rain.” Bloom works the emotions of fear, grief, laughter, disgust, and love that redeems – all through the mouth of poetry and people. “Fear goes shopping, covers its mouth,” while “Laughter is wandering the neighbourhood … / trying to find some mouths.” Love appears unexpectedly in domestic ordinariness (“like the smell of pizza / when the box is opened”), or in a more sublime surprise (“like a mountain after months of fog”). Months of time and mouths of words coalesce in riptides.

Surreal flashes appear in “Quiver Fish”: “Some quiver fish in my belly begins to speak / in its own voice.” This fish is both beginner and old in various directions of up, down, and sideways: “i live a cross-hatched life.” This cross-hatching swims to chiasmus: “the whole school is in me and i am in the school.” The fish quivers to the other “into your veins and lake out.” In a riptide lake shifts from noun to verb as part of transfer and transference. “you mistook this rippling for fear. / let me learn every tail-thrash of the way.” In a school of fish, the poet learns, and riptide ripples from body to body.

“Rending the Garments” explores grief and gathering. “There should be a shiva for every kind of grief – the break-up, the diagnosis, the assault – “ People arrive and “hold you” in “a community of you.” They appear “to show there’s a rip in the face of the world.” Rip and tide may separate or converge in the crossing of faces: “I left my face in case someone should want to cross” (“When the veil lifted”). In her perceptual field she stares at Viola Desmond’s face on a ten-dollar bill; she times chiasmus “On Thursday at X o’clock,” and gathers water where the “waves of the sea are biblical.” (“All Day I Look at Things”).

Levinas’s faces course through this collection of ethics, empathy, and epiphany where “It’s still possible to love / how small we are / in the face of her face.” Bloom listens carefully and hears feelings that are the truth of another. From the face value of a nickel lodged in the throat to priceless encounters, she measures moments and travels with the Buddha.

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About the Author

Ronna Bloom is a Toronto-based poet and educator and the author of seven books of poetry. Her work has been broadcast on CBC, recorded by the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, and translated into Bangla and Chinese. Ronna is also someone who puts poetry to work in the world; she has led many initiatives to bring poetry into health care settings, specifically developing the first Poet-in-Residence program at Mount Sinai Hospital/Sinai Health. Ronna’s most recent book is A Possible Trust: The Poetry of Ronna Bloom, selected with an introduction by Phil Hall (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, September 2023). www.ronnabloom.com

About the Reviewer

Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.

He has published 250 essays and reviews in books and journals across Canada, the United States, and Europe.

Book Details

8.5 X 5.75 Inches | 128 pages
Publication Date: September 15, 2025
ISBN 9781771316583