Lifeline

Lynn Szabo is an assistant professor of English and Coordinator of
Freshman English Courses at Trinity Western University.

Ruth Panofsky teaches English at Ryerson University. In this, her first
volume of poetry, she communicates her esthetic in an epigraph from
Nietzsche: “We have art so that we might not perish from the truth.”

Her unsegmented volume begins with horrors from such truth, portrayed
in the sufferings of children that bookend the collection. “Pearl”
depicts the tortured choice of parents who elect to throw their child
from the train taking the family to their certain Holocaust death.
Children falling into horror are pictured in a number of the poems—a
motif, perhaps, for the human race falling into death. Ill-fated
children include the speaker’s son whose diagnoses of Tourette
syndrome throws him and his mother, connected by birth through their
“lifelines,” into the chaos of loss and alienation redeemed by love:
“I am not the one / with Tourette / but that no longer / seems
true.” Her self-disclosure that poetry is her therapy follows:
“Against a formidable foe / I wield my pen / and with each stroke /
subdue the enemy.”

Within settings that include the violence and melancholia of community
and domesticity, women’s angst and joy in the marital arrangement, and
the attendant requirements for adaptation among victims, the characters
of these verses stage their rites of passage, losses, and joys. The
writing tends to lead the reader toward its descriptions rather than
into layers of potential for interpretation. In this way, at times it
robs the verse of pithiness and the intensity of the poetic line. By
creating a shorthand that omits articles and adjectives, the abbreviated
lines create a certain breathlessness but do not obviate wordiness.
Pleasant wordplays and compelling image recordings add to this
collection, which marks Panofsky’s beginnings as a poet.