Cruz Grants Redemption in "Ruin"

"Ruin," Cynthia Cruz's debut collection of poems, delivers a rare emotional force that has been scorned by some critics for its sentimentality and unabashed grievance. Small Spiral Notebook, despite offering some hearty praise for Cruz's efforts, condemns her style for its quasi-maudlin tendencies - "too histrionic...too sonically agonized...wreaking too much self-inflicted pain."

Indeed, the speaker's cold and haunted reminiscences are sometimes a sufferance, reading like the disturbed reflections of a girlhood traumatized by untimely death. But such hauntings are nothing to shy away from, especially when they are as creatively rendered as this. The entire collection is unified by a wintry despondence and a shadowed ambiance, where confession blurs with creation and the reader struggles along with Cruz to find redemption in the ruins of a shattered past. And such moments of salvation are found in the most unlikely of places, nestled in the deathbed of her frail and doomed brother "too fragile for the world," her atrophying mare "wasting away in the barn, her weak limbs at rest," and the murderous games played in a shadowy orchard: "Let's find something still alive / to kill."

With her brother and her innocence hovering upon the brink of death, the heart feels heavy and one wishes not to read further. Then a stab of light comes in the form of a brief rhapsody like "Goleta," where we are extended a good memory and allowed to savor it. And we do so with more relish than ever imagined, as the imprisoning ruins are outshined but for a moment by simple and exalted beauty:

Little Fox was mine, upon whose back I broke
Loose those locked rooms, that
House. The Ranch, Goleta,
The impossible fire. A field, a world, a winter
Of singing that would not stop. At night,
Even now, I can hear the sound
Of great flocks passing overhead.

Cruz's "Ruin" tells a tale of transcendent pain and healing. She plays with the abstract, the surreal, and an endlessly strange array of metaphors that drag us into haunted milieus and then grant us the wings to escape.