The Proving Grounds

William Blackburn is a professor of English at the University of
Calgary.

Love and loss, courage and fear, moments of union snatched from lives
lived alone—these give thematic unity to Tregebov’s fine third
collection. Its early poems deal with the untimely death of her
sister-in-law, Judy (who was killed in a car crash), and with the
serious illness of her infant son; and they set the tone for the
clear-eyed confrontations with loss, which characterize the entire
volume, reminding us that “warmth is an aberration in the universe,”
and that it is “useless, to promise in this world not to hurt,” even
for those “whose love did everything it could.” The later poems move
beyond the personal realm “of how our bodies bind us and how they tear
us asunder” to the social, the political, and the philosophical, when
we can admit “our real life [is] always elsewhere” and “our
survival / was not according to God’s order / but to the discrete,
idiosyncratic order of crystals.” It is, of course, a truism to say
that an optimism that fails to confront everything a diligent pessimism
suggests is not worth much, but Tregebov’s optimism is not of this
pallid, anemic, deplorably familiar sort. The last poem—“The Once
World”—confronts the universality of loss (actual or potential, but
both certain) and reminds us that it is precisely this universality that
makes love even possible. That we can only love what we can lose—and
that we can nonetheless love—is the final message of this very fine
collection.