In No Longer at This Address, Ruth Bavetta trains her artist’s eye on the hearty fragility of life, chiefly through the lens of small details which, taken together, paint a broad canvas of life. Grounded in sky and sun, stars and wind, mountains and sea, her poems explore the mysteries of time and the arcs of family narratives traveling forward and back. Here you will find tomatoes warm from the sun; the smell of wet leaves and earthen cellars; the green glass globes that somehow do not break; the plastic bag from the hospital holding shoes, underwear, socks, the sweater scissored from the body. Drawing from the simplicity of everyday objects and the quotidian lives of her mother, aunts, and grandmother, Bavetta’s poems squeeze both bitter and sweet from the ripe fruits of past, present, and future. Readers will recognize facets of their own families in this wonderful collection and, as is true with all good poetry, will want to read it again and again.
—Ken Craft, author of The Indifferent World
This marvel of a book wrings beauty from the hard task of watching one’s mother disappear, bit by resistant bit, into dementia. “It seemed she was always standing / between the door and the west moon.” But it does much more, illuminating not only that sad progression but the priceless bones of memory that frame it. These poems weave a poignant elegy of their own: The silence of a left-behind home. The mother, in her “life without shadows,” searching for her keys. Ordinary moments just on the other side of the window pane: the cat in the street, the dappled leaves near the family cabin, where “all is sunshine and smoke/ weighted against the edge/ of morning.” There is a sadness here, but without self-pity, so deftly and gorgeously expressed that it casts its own light. The things we remember that stick like snapshots. The journey through precious, ordinary days struck with gold, that lasted for their time.
—Ricki Mandeville
Bavetta does what few poets can manage. She writes about her mother without getting maudlin or wallowing in the pain of her death. She does so by using her artist’s eye to let us see for ourselves. We then relate her poems to losses of our own. She also brings her poet’s ear to the task. Pantoums and villanelles, with their repeated lines, are perfect for describing rerun conversations and the sameness of days in dementia. Instead of weighing us down with loss, she lifts us, showing us what it means to be human.
—Alarie Tennille
Ruth Bavetta writes at a messy desk overlooking the Pacific Ocean. She is the author of Fugitive Pigments (FutureCycle Press, 2013) Embers on the Stairs (Moontide Press, 2014) and Flour Water Salt (FutureCycle Press 2016.) Her poetry has been published in Rattle, Nimrod, Tar River Review, North American Review, Spillway, Hanging Loose, Rhino, Poetry East, and Poetry New Zealand among others. Visual art informs many of her poems She writes of food and love, of her Italian immigrant family, the experience of growing old, the singularity of toothpicks, the sorrow of Afghanistan. She likes the light on November afternoons, the smell of the ocean. She hates pretense, fundamentalism and sauerkraut.
