Day of the Child

“Dreamy … shimmering … In considering how to talk with her child about current events, Ross writes ‘My job to transform, now, / this narrative, allow compassion’s vow.’ It’s a heavy responsibility along with her other roles: ‘soother, watcher, blame-taker.’ As Ross generously lets readers peek into scenes of her and her son writing poems, watching a young buck, or drawing ‘joy’s map,’ she adds another role: wonder-sharer.”

“Arra Lynn Ross’s Day of the Child chronicles the seams of “Months. Years. Minutes.” in the ultimate love story, its enchantments, fusions and refusals––retooling language with syntactical rigor, taut syncopation, and the keenest perceptions. The poet’s ear and eye are meticulous, resolute, and virtuosic, lacing the taxonomy of parenthood against the inexorable urge for the self into fabled psalms that embody the personal and universal, liminal and mundane. “But a heart! Inside. Of mine––not/mine–by my body’s lambent knowledge wrought/your blood pump hustled/and sang   O indivisible   divisible,” Ross writes, offering revelatory glimpses of, through the fracturing of light, a most primal, tenacious love.”

“ ‘Uphold heaven—humble & hurting, here—rapt,’ Arra Lynn Ross writes early on in Day of the Child. This pristine line opens like a fan and radiates through the entire collection—it bears the dazzling solace and resolve to be with and bear it. Ross’s fervent and riveted eye threads the needle, piercing ‘us, tripped of facades, gods’ and ‘a finger, wet, running the wine glasses’ rims for water’s pitch: listen.’ In fact, each poem imprints a new way to listen, a new way to hone the listening so that ‘rapt’ becomes a diurnal conduit. In a series of phrasal movements, the day’s accretion gathers tenfold to make childhood, which builds to encompass more time and deeper lineage. But there is nothing without the day and for the day to accrue we must know the choral minutes that grow in its interior. Tranche by tranche, Arra Lynn Ross makes a diurnal map, each one articulated, held and here.”

“What good luck to encounter the work of a poet of such recognizable gifts, a poet whose syntax is a music all its own, whose imagery is both tenderness and insight, whose narrative skills create a world both its own and ours. Arra Lynn Ross has made for us a book-long poetics of parenthood: a lyric meditation where the mysterium of time is sang for all to see. Open this book on any page and watch how a mother stands between the outside word and her child, making a lullaby for any age that both protects and reveals. Here language itself becomes the act of parenthood. What a book!”

“Day of the Child is an embodiment of a poetic tradition internalized and reinvented: Ross’s music, meter, patterns of sound, and syntax may suggest Hopkins and cummings and Berryman, but they display a precision, an attention, and a skill that are their maker’s own. Like a stone that, broken, reveals the mystery of a geode’s brilliant facets, Day of the Child is a revelation of the complex and often beautiful experiences of being-mother, of mothering, and of being-child. Arra Ross has made—the verbs for intricate needlework would be appropriate here—a portrait of and in time that is painstaking in its accounting and recounting of the totally ordinary, totally precious facts of daily life.”