An entire stanza in the title poem is devoted to an accumulation of plant names, to the point where, as we read the poem out loud, the names roll off the tongue, evoking climbing plants whose tendrils spread everywhere. Positive qualities in people are systematically associated with nature-a man’s kindness is thus described as “abundant and floral.” The very rhythm of the poems, regardless of line and stanza length, magnifies the feeling of effusion: punctuation is often sparse (mostly commas) and works with the stream-of-consciousness, synesthetic flow to give the poetic voice an ample and breathless quality, a joyful urgency. The garden in general is a space of utter freedom, denoting the joyful profusion of life (even with the presence of the gardener, who is only pruning here and there to fortify the trees, even with the figure of the “puritan” nestled within each of us). Odes become elegies then, but the garden is always at the center of it all, serving as the communal space where meaningful relationships might be forged. The bitter, tragic irony of life does not escape the poet though, as when he recounts his friendship with Don, “a 53-year-old gay black man” who survived in his youth but was eventually murdered. In the closing poem, “last will and testament,” the poet pleads to be dismembered after his death and scattered across the garden, so as to be literally part of the regenerative force in the soil. In a sense, the poems work as “the factory / where loss makes all things / beautiful grow”: in “burial,” Gay recounts how he placed his father’s ashes over the roots of the plum tree he was planting: at the time of harvest, his father’s spirit seemed to have imbued the fruit itself from ash to branch to plum, the paternal presence is magnified. But this sense of an imminent threat is in turn dispelled, or at least muted by the end of the poem, which moves back to the space of the garden, one associated with miracles.Ī fervent gardener himself, Gay is intimately acquainted with the ways life and death work together, both within the garden and the human body. Recalling how pleasant it is to sleep in one’s clothes veers off into an unsettling meditation that does not shy away from a certain darkness:īeneath a façade of effervescent joy, subtle defamiliarization is at work here: the tranquil familiarity of sleep is disturbed here by considerations of death and violence.
Buttoning one’s shirt leads one to ponder on the fragility of things. Here, the most mundane things acquire profound significance and can convey nuanced reflections on race, gender, and sexuality. Ferociously earnest and jubilant, Ross Gay’s third collection is not simply an ode to finding gratitude for the things we usually take for granted: it is a triumphant declaration of love for the world we live in. There may be effusion in Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, but there’s definitely no mawkishness, no syrupy sentimentalism.
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