Indigo

If I were on an island, and I brought one poetry book with me, Indigo would be it. I have so many favorite poets, but I always come back to Ellen Bass, over and over, pages dog-eared, whole lines underlined, the over and over and over of Ellen. She is the poet for our times, for humanity, reminding us in every poem who we are and who we have the potential to become. Thank you Ellen Bass for showing us how it's done, and that poetry is for everyone.

Ellen Bass is extraordinary as a poet and so much more. This latest collection is superb. Read some of the poems when you are happy or sad or bored. Any circumstance will be enhanced.

It’s a beautiful collection that everyone can benefit from reading.

I enjoy these poems

I have a soft spot for poets whom I can imagine writing about a hamburger. They are few, and Ellen Bass is one of the best of them — appetitive, appreciative, and ever sensory.Her latest collection, INDIGO, opens with “Sous Chef,” which includes these lines:With all that’s destroyed, look how the world still holds a golden pear.Freckled and floral, a shimmering marvel.We also get, bless her, an “Ode to Fat.” Then there’s “Ode to the Pork Chop” and “Taking My Old Dog Out to Pee Before Bed.”Bass continues to give us some of the most moving love poems of our time. As the object of her love ages, the love deepens. “Taking Off the Front of the House” concludes with this:

And as she turns toward me and I feel againthe marvelous architecture of her hips, the moon,that expert in lighting, rises over the rooflineflooding us in her flawless silvery wash.“Sometimes I’m Frightened” closes with:Sometimes I can taste the distance between us. Raintrembles on the camellia’s waxy leaves and spillsbead by bead from the tips. I can rememberbeing a child, opening my mouth to the rain.From “Any Common Desolation”:“Warm socks. You remember your mother,her precision a ceremony, as she gatheredthe white cotton, slipped it over your toes,drew up the heel, turned the cuff.Everything there is arresting and tactile, and nothing is, or needs to be, referential to anything other than itself.Let me quote one striking poem in its entirety:FUNGUS ON FALLEN ALDER AT LOOKOUT CREEKFlorid, fluted, flowery petal, flounceof a girl’s dress, ruffled fan,striped in what seems to my eyean excess of extravagance,intricately ribboned like a secretcode, a colorist’s vision of DNA.At the outermost edge a scallopof ivory, then a tweedy russet,then mouse gray, a crescentof celadon velvet, a streak of sleek seal brown,a dark arc of copper, then butter,then celadon again, again butter, againcopper and on into the center, striped thinnerand thinner to the green, green moss-furry heart.How can this be necessary?Yet it grows and is making moreof itself, dozens and dozens of tiny starts, starsno bigger than a baby’s thumbnail,all of them sucking one young dead treeon a gravel bank that will be washed awayin the next flooding winter. But isn’t the air herecool and wet and almost unbearably sweet?Thank you, Ellen Bass, for another treasure. I look forward to your next.

I buy many poetry books, and most are quickly forgotten. This collection is both memorable and instructive for poets. Bass's details place the reader in the middle of the life, emotions, and experience of the poems' speakers. Nothing short of dazzling. I highly recommend this one--as good, if not better than her previous terrific book, Like a Beggar.

different, real, each poem a small, powerful story.