The Goodbye Kit by Daneen Bergland
Airlie Press, 2024
What an oddly engaging and compelling collection The Goodbye Kit is. Daneen Bergland has placed a surreal and almost mythic lens on her observations of love, relationship, rite-of-passage, and our place in the fragile natural world. There are echoes of Sexton and Oliver, evocative imagery, and homage to wildlife. She juxtaposes the internal and external ecologies of experience to create poems that release a feral spirit within the domestic vista, and she synthesizes life episodes into wonderous, whimsical, and sometimes disturbing dream-like sequences.
Some of the poems seem almost apocalyptical, cautionary and prescriptive as Bible verse, starting with the irresistibly titled “Animals Invaluable to Epidemiologists for Tracking the Spread of Disease Will Appear to Us as Angels”:
These will be among the signs there’s no going back:
A string of disembodied wings at your feet form a path.Soap operas start going off the air. Words like heretofore
Rejoin the lexicon. Bedbugs make an epic comeback.. . .
You can feel small if that makes you feel better.
The carcasses will still sigh their breath of flies,The wolves sing the same shivered chord as the trains
As mosquitoes form clouds of lullabies over the plains.
An iconic female figure makes her appearance in “Eve Wakes Up After the Fall and Picks Up Her Phone,” “Eve in Old Age,“ and “Sometimes Eve Gets Drunk Enough to Forgive Herself,” all clever re-imaginings of the woman in our midst experiencing a barrage of events and contemporary dilemmas that lead to realizations post-paradise. In the first of these, her narrative swirls with disconnected images and scenes of nature and human behavior that flow in a sequence that turns uncomfortable yet teachable—the lessons gained in losing security for freedom in a complex, vulnerable world. She declares:
I feel my heart:
an internal pulsing halo
insisting on gravityas it makes the sound
of apples
hitting the groundbecause when we ate the fruit
god fell too and gave us
what he couldn’t take back:a force so close
to what tethers the starsit pulls us toward each other’s dense centers
The incarnation of Eve in the second poem moves among us, a life-worn figure that’s mysterious yet familiar: “Has a shopping cart, a plastic bag / hat. She once collected cats, sold words on cardboard: / the names she gave creatures / as each one died.” She prattles on, and “plants all the weeds,” and shuffles in her domain with a wistful determination. In the last poem giving homage to Eve, she anticipates, in a regretful reverie, losing things from life—both desirous and mundane that we take for granted—including “…the quiet sunlight / at the mall, the bromeliads floating over the ice rink.” She laments, “I’m so tired / of cataloging all the things we’ll miss. Plastic, pollen, / impeccable penmanship, and other tools of faith / in permanence.”
Bergland’s lyricism is threaded throughout these poems, enhancing a sensory connection to stages of love and nature, as with “Love Scene with Maggots”:
Long ago our love was feral,
it grew over us like ferns and moss
until we felt languid as rotting leaves
And in “Skinny Dip,” the scenario reads like an incantation:
whole moon for a halo
she flickers like an insect
shimmering on a switchblade
. . .
foot fidgety for the mud suck
in a surface tension necklace
in a cold water dress / one sinks
and her hair turns to ink
There is a synesthetic quality to many of these poems, adding to the surreal impact of their imagery and music. In “Fashion Crisis” the environmentally tampered spring is “sticky as a pop song,” and “Answers for Melancholy” is a disquieting, block-shaped narrative:
When the sky was the color of eyelids, I broke all my teeth into crumbs
and threw them to pigeons. They threw them back: a shower of sparks hissed
against concrete and stung my face like windblown sand. The rest of the day
my coffee tasted of singed feathers, and the rain made its lavender sound.
Pasternak stated that poetry searches for music amid the tumult of the dictionary. The poems in The Goodbye Kit create their own tumultuous melody—the rhythms and echoes of compelling, cautionary messages.
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Mindy Kronenberg is an award-winning poet and writer with numerous publication credits world-wide. She teaches writing, literature, and arts subjects at SUNY Empire State College, publishes Book/Mark Quarterly Review, edits Oberon poetry magazine, and is the author of Dismantling the Playground (Birnham Wood), Images of America: Miller Place (Arcadia), and OPEN, an illustrated poetry book (Clare Songbirds Publishers).