Vinland

Jamie Ross

Winner of the 2008 Four Way Books Intro Prize
selected by Brigit Pegeen Kelly

The name given to the New World by Norse settlers, Jamie Ross’ debut collection, Vinland, is poetry of exploration. But beyond that, Vinland is a celebration of relationships, both our relationships to each other and our relationships to the earth. Specifically, Ross explores the human connection to earth, recognizing that this relationship is both fleeting and eternal in its nature. “How / the fish swim as he sets them free, fossils / in this ocean that he cleaves and charts,” Ross writes of his father climbing a mountain, “ancients in this story he encompasses / and enters.” These poems connect to the reader the way a “steel chisel” connects to a mountain—the face is permanently changed.

Vinland reminds the reader that poetry is everywhere, constant in its presence, powerful in its permeation. In day-to-day existence, as poems bubble just beneath, Ross lovingly coaxes them to the surface. Take for example, a simple restaurant scene: “He lofts a pitcher / over his head, reaches out for her deep-curved cup.” These are salt-of-the-earth poems brought to the page through short, matter of fact phrases that explore quotidian sorrow and joy, located around emotionally-significant objects from chainsaws (“I bought it from Ingrid, / in the trailer up the road. / Her husband left it / when he left her”) to hand-knit sweaters (“Flecks of brilliant soft / in our long dark again”) to cows in a field (“It’s late spring. / And the legs of the bull / are tucked, useless for now, beneath him.”) Ross invites his readers to look again at the world around him, to see not just a chainsaw or a sweater or a cow, but the beauty and poetry that, to paraphrase Miroslav Holub, is found in all things. It takes a book as special as Jamie Ross’s Vinland to show us how.