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snowmaiden's review against another edition
4.0
Often I pick poetry books based solely upon the cover art, but I bought this one just because of the title. It sounds jarring at first, but of course every love story does end in ruin, even if only because of the death of one of the partners after a lifetime of happiness. And when you consider that what "apocalypse" actually means is "revelation," then the title takes on another meaning, because every love story is ultimately about how two people find out the real truth about each other.
There's something else going here, though. Our culture seems dedicated to the pleasant fallacy that romantic love is as pink and fluffy as cotton candy, but if you've ever been in love for real, you know that simply isn't true. Falling in love is very tumultuous, as your body fills with raging hormones that take you up way too high and then down too low, that sometimes even make it impossible for you to eat or sleep. Just seeing the person you love can be almost too much to bear, but when you're away from them for any length of time, you start imagining everything that could possibly go wrong and worry that you will somehow never see them again. The sweet agony of falling deeply in love is the real subject of this collection.
The first section, "No Quick Misery," is about the roller coaster ride of early love. My favorite poem here is "I Put False Hope in Celestial Bodies," which starts out "Your orbits are erratic, strange parabolas of leaving/ and returning, vast galaxies of lapis and ashes./ There is the promise of communication, but I have not/ seen it-- no flares, no comet tails, no meteor showers." Although this is the only poem where Vorreyer uses this cosmic imagery, all of the poems are this dramatic. Her most frequent images come from the wild forest of folktales, full of bears and wolves. Even something as commonplace as grass seems malignant in this worldview. In "In the Night Cathedral," Vorreyer writes, "I should be splayed on the lawn,/ every blade of grass a deserved/ flagellation."
In the second section, "There Has Been Damage," the poems deal with loss after a break-up or separation. These poems are desolate in their imagery, and many of them are prose poems, as if the whole structure of the world has suddenly been lost in the lover's absence.
The third section, "We Feast on This Believing," are poems of reunion. One would expect them to be joyful, but they are not. The last poem, "Redux," ends like this: "Each day we wake and test/ the stitches, darn the tears./ We thread our limbs, lace/ our fingers. We hang on." The sense here is that things will never be the same again, but that it is still worth it to try anyway.
I suppose it would be unfair of me to complain that a collection with a title like this was too dark. Certainly, it made me feel a lot while I was reading it, which is probably why it took me a whole week to work my way through. Vorreyer's imagery here is so lush and captivating that I'd love to read one of her other collections and see what she does with a different subject.
There's something else going here, though. Our culture seems dedicated to the pleasant fallacy that romantic love is as pink and fluffy as cotton candy, but if you've ever been in love for real, you know that simply isn't true. Falling in love is very tumultuous, as your body fills with raging hormones that take you up way too high and then down too low, that sometimes even make it impossible for you to eat or sleep. Just seeing the person you love can be almost too much to bear, but when you're away from them for any length of time, you start imagining everything that could possibly go wrong and worry that you will somehow never see them again. The sweet agony of falling deeply in love is the real subject of this collection.
The first section, "No Quick Misery," is about the roller coaster ride of early love. My favorite poem here is "I Put False Hope in Celestial Bodies," which starts out "Your orbits are erratic, strange parabolas of leaving/ and returning, vast galaxies of lapis and ashes./ There is the promise of communication, but I have not/ seen it-- no flares, no comet tails, no meteor showers." Although this is the only poem where Vorreyer uses this cosmic imagery, all of the poems are this dramatic. Her most frequent images come from the wild forest of folktales, full of bears and wolves. Even something as commonplace as grass seems malignant in this worldview. In "In the Night Cathedral," Vorreyer writes, "I should be splayed on the lawn,/ every blade of grass a deserved/ flagellation."
In the second section, "There Has Been Damage," the poems deal with loss after a break-up or separation. These poems are desolate in their imagery, and many of them are prose poems, as if the whole structure of the world has suddenly been lost in the lover's absence.
The third section, "We Feast on This Believing," are poems of reunion. One would expect them to be joyful, but they are not. The last poem, "Redux," ends like this: "Each day we wake and test/ the stitches, darn the tears./ We thread our limbs, lace/ our fingers. We hang on." The sense here is that things will never be the same again, but that it is still worth it to try anyway.
I suppose it would be unfair of me to complain that a collection with a title like this was too dark. Certainly, it made me feel a lot while I was reading it, which is probably why it took me a whole week to work my way through. Vorreyer's imagery here is so lush and captivating that I'd love to read one of her other collections and see what she does with a different subject.
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