Our Lady of Ruins Review

I’ve only posted a couple book reviews over at my other blog The Abyssal Vault, but I’ve decided to start posting them here from now on; the Abyssal Vault is more focused on movies and I decided to keep my movie reviews and literary reviews separate. Unlike the poetry, I will be posting book reviews sporadically.

Our Lady of the Ruins by Traci Brimhall is a collection of poems about a group of women on a pilgrimage to find God or gods, traveling through an apocalyptic world whose sorrows challenge either the existence or goodness of God. Religious figures, the priests, are portrayed ambiguously, either as deceitful, exploiting others’ faith to survive in a tough world, or as devout. A recurrent theme is the death of children, specifically stillborn infants, which is as heartbreaking as it is beautifully rendered. In my mind, the most moving poem is “How to Find the Underworld,” which serves as instructions on how to get to the underworld, what to do there, and a description of the underworld. The final lines are about how you should react when you find your daughter in the underworld.

“You can’t bring her back. You can’t bring back
anything from here that you want to keep. Only grief
and a new obedience and four pounds of ash.”

The poetry is often sensual and has a kind of vagueness that lends it a mythic and mystic quality; in other words, they’re meaningful vagaries. The poems have a unified voice and theme, but that mythic quality makes it seem like the poems are talking about a world that is not our own or a world in the near future.