A Possible Trust: The Poetry of Ronna Bloom

With compassion, humour and sharp-eyed irreverence, Ronna Bloom's work has made a significant impact on Canadian poetry. A Possible Trust is selected from her work to date.

Bloom writes concisely of the precarious, the ephemeral, the epic, and of the fragility and determination of people in daily life and extraordinary health crises. She is attentive to suffering, as well as to spontaneous connections and gestures of love. Her poetry has been used by teachers, architects, spiritual leaders, and in hospitals across Canada. This is poetry engaged with spontaneity, presence, work, and health care. There is a tenderness here where living matters, as does dying, a valuing of the incident, the encounter, the unexpected, the sorrow and the bowl-me-over delight.

Bloom speaks to us about how vulnerability, suffering, and the release into joy, can combine as an ongoing, never-ending life practice. She mines her own experience while looking out into the world with awareness, empathy and the willingness to risk being wide open. These poems stand firm with readers.

Editor and poet Phil Hall's Introduction "To Lead by Crying" argues for a poetics of empathy, and is an enthusiastic retrospective of Bloom's work. In Ronna Bloom's Afterword, she traces the relevance of photography, psychotherapy, and meditation in her work. Defiant, comical, revealing, impolite yet respectful, A Possible Trust is a retrospective and celebration.

Ronna Bloom is the author of six books of poetry. She lives in Toronto. She is a registered psychotherapist (CRPO inactive). Her work has been broadcast on the CBC, recorded by the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, translated into Bangla and Chinese, and shortlisted for several Canadian literary awards. She has performed with Juno award-winning musician Jayme Stone. In a collaboration with PLANT Architects, her poem “The City” was painted 30 meters long on King Street in Toronto for the summer of 2018.

Phil Hall has published many books and chapbooks of poetry. In 2011/12 he won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry in English, and Ontario’s Trillium Book Award. He has been twice nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Guthrie Clothing: The Poetry of Phil Hall appeared in 2015 from Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Most recently, Beautiful Outlaw Press has published Toward A Blacker Ardour (2021) andThe Ash Bell. He lives in Perth, Ontario.