Bells by Rodger LeGrand
Finishing Line Press
Release date January 17, 2025, softcover, $17.99
You can almost feel the clenched fist of anger, coiled with power, bursting onto the page. A fist shaking at a sorrow to arise from our collective carelessness and the inevitable anguish of life unraveling at a rate we cannot control. As expressed in his line, “An endless / spiraling chorus of fuck off, / fuck off, fuck off / from a list of species / that have been deforested, / desalinated, destroyed.” The question is, can Pushcart-nominated poet Rodger LeGrand’s deep, resonant work call us to action, so we move forward with more care?
Bells is a two, three, or even four-time … read—don’t stop at once with this collection of poignant poems. There are so many layers, and, with each read, there is more to uncover. I dug deep, and what I found was, for one, a sly way to drop in the political. Not the raised fist of a revolutionary, but one of a linguistic wizard who waves words that, once they stick, take hold. Such as, “lost wishes, a sea burial of history’s / regard for human dignity.” LeGrand conjures up phrases that, once you have heard them, cannot be unheard. His work brings up such intense feelings that you cannot turn back and be blissfully ignorant of the truth to which they point.
In addition, what I found was luminescent. LeGrand shines a light in the dark corners so that, as a reader, you can see something we all might be avoiding. How life, for instance, has a hard grip on us until it does not, and the way we react to that slipping away is our final act while we’re “waiting for the world to end.”
He also shares his reimagined perspective on aging and loss and all of our futures. These lines from “Zombified” show his gift of illumination: “It’s been years since your neurons / started to rot like an old grape vine / wrapped around a pergola. // In my mind / you’re still on that mountain top / and it’ll snow soon. / That’s where I’ll leave you.”
And he doesn’t allow the reader to dismiss the subtle. That third read was the most enriching so far. These poems provide great rewards for those who are paying attention.
