God’s in the Weeds: Daneen Bergland’s “The Goodbye Kit”

“Eve about to be cast out of the Garden kills as the mistress of straight-faced understatement. There is no fury, no rebuke, or if there is, it has not set in yet. Instead, we get rationalizing, looking on the bright side, and philosophical self-doubt.”

This review is the third consecutive essay I have devoted to an author of Airlie Press, a publisher where the writers are also the editors. These talented poets are bringing a fresh look at contemporary poetry by focusing on poetry being written in Oregon, especially by women. As FC2 did years back for fiction, the writer-editors have taken matters into their own hands and produced exquisite editions, friendly to the touch and challenging to the mind and the senses.

Of the three Airlie poets I have considered, Daneen Bergland is the most impish. To read her verse is willingly to hold a pack of firecrackers in your hand, light them, and get so busy watching them explode that you forget to put them down. Reading her work sent me back to James Tate, one of my early favorites, a prolific and changeable author I always felt was hemmed in by the descriptor “surreal.” The poet Charles Simic, interviewing Tate in the Paris Review for the Summer 2006 issue, holds a similar view to mine.

“The critics usually deal with him by calling him a surrealist and leaving it at that. If he is one, he belongs to that native strain of surrealism to which Buster Keaton and W. C. Fields also belong. ‘It’s a tragic story, but that’s what’s so funny,’ Tate says in one poem. He is one of our great comic masters.”