poetry

In these poems we find a song and a touch. They open in offering, reach out in longing, and gather in, in healing. They awaken spirits, animal stirrings, and dream machines. They form a dirge, but also a hope and a covenant, if we are there.

I read The Doctor of Flowers as slowly as I could make myself read it, quietly swinging between its “stay, please” and its “turn the page, there is more.” Rachel Blum’s poems bring grief and beauty into the same room, waiting for each to teach the other something that matters about the world, about our hearts, about what it means to love deeply. There is so much light in this book, and some of the things revealed in the light are heartbreaking, and some are gorgeous, and often they are the same thing. This is now one of my books, one of those books that does what Wallace Stevens said about great poetry – it adds to the Res … My gratefulness for these poems is as tender as it can possibly be.

These poems by Rachel Blum are softly spoken but they hit hard. The death of a child is always too much to bear. It derails whole lives. But in her quiet and stunning The Doctor of Flowers, she has chosen love as a way out of grief. There is courage and craft here. In helping others, she opens her heart and through her poems, opens ours. She tells us right off: The unfathomable part of death is love. So we invented the soul to be its ship. A book to light a candle with, and be.

In Rachel Blum’s The Doctor of Flowers we find ourselves cradled in the poet’s hands. She whispers to us, tells us how to share our power with the other natural things: stars, flowers, dreams, words. Then she releases us, wings stronger than before. This book is a healing sanctuary to which any reader will often wish to return.

As a teacher of young writers, I encourage my students to read books that show them how to feel their worlds. This is precisely one of those books. Teach it, read it, cherish its benefits.

In her tender, haunting, and gently powerful poems, Rachel Blum sees the familiar with fine, estranging eyes. The sentiments in these poems arrive from the depths, and we are transported by the sense of the numinous which permeates her words.

Rachel Blum’s first book of poems, The Doctor of Flowers, is nothing less than beautiful and profound. Her work is at once full of pain and the elements of its relief. Blum refuses to look away from pain, indeed she travels with it, taking turns following its lead and leading it to a better end herself. Reading her work involves a deep trust between poet and reader, and it’s worth every line of that emotional connection. Her poetic world makes grief into an atmosphere of surprising livability—circulating, moveable, and spirit-filled.

As the Japanese art of kintsugi repairs shattered pottery with gold and platinum, making it more cherishable, The Doctor of Flowers enters and runs through our bruised hearts, and mends them with immense healing beauty.

When we read a great poet for the first time, we sometimes wonder how we could have done without them for so long. When I read Rachel Blum, I had that feeling.