The work of poet Mary
Ruefle is often compared to Emily Dickinson, but in her 11th collection, The
Most Of It,
readers unfamiliar with her may spot a kinship of sorts with a more recent
fiction phenomenon: Miranda July. But while her pieces often invoke a similar
wide-eyed deliberation, they reject the childlike theories of everything in
favor of a bewitching uncertainty about the relation between the matter at hand
and the world outside. Ruefle, whose impressive academy credentials include a
Guggenheim fellowship and a visiting-faculty position at the Iowa Writers'
Workshop, has created in The Most Of It a deceptively complicated collection of
episodes easy to get into, and precisely captivating.
Each of Ruefle's minute
prose poems work like photographs in which several things are happening at
once, some of them just outside of frame. The argument the speaker in "The
Bench" has with her husband over the pieces of furniture they each have in mind
to build for the back yard captures exactly the tone of a marital disagreement
whose terms come to life separately. While many of these pieces explore such
everyday topics as birdfeeders and the post office, others apply the same
microscope eye to scenes which incorporate elements of magical realism, like
the miniature world depicted in "The University Of The Limitless Mouse," or the
family trade in other people's secrets in "The Diary": "I would sit in the
straw on the barn floor, the earliest light streaming in through cracks in the
wall… and some of the chaff from the barn floor floating in that light,
particles of straw we used to cover the diaries and other stuff, all afloat in
a never-ending stream of hope as I lay on the floor and read."
Ruefle describes these
pieces as fables, but in practice, the moralizing is kept to a neat minimum.
There are a few missteps in this row of tiny tableaux—"Hard Boiled
Detective" marries a little Amelie and a little Andy Rooney, to the benefit of
neither, in spite of the witty juxtaposition of its title and subject. But
readers, poetry lovers or not, will be stirred to re-visit their favorite
episodes. Even in the story, chronicling the letters of an eccentric aunt which
become fodder for an entire neighborhood, a sense of wonder trumps anything as
pedestrian as a lesson.