Scar

Bruce Bond’s Scar is full of scars, yes, on wrists and brows and arms, but full, too, of questions, each punctuated with a period rather than a question mark. “Who are we deceiving.” “Is the knife still there.” “How many fingers. What’s your name.” “Is it the same with you.” “Why is it gods always talk in echoes, / if at all, their words buried in words.” Bond’s book echoes, too. With the words of the gods buried in its words, how could it not. — H. L. Hix



Bruce Bond’s exquisite new collection, Scar, opens in a Terezin haze, set after the slice of war, where the instruments of the dead seem to signal a traceable echo back to old traumas. Dantean, a book of dark woods, Scar studies how we cast our inner wound onto outer worlds, where “every home is the one I lost to fire,” and it follows the echo to its source, to Hell and the long climb upward through the canal of the ear, as it were, in this collection that leaps with such deftness between memory and myth. The title poem, a meditation on scars and scarring, sustains breathtaking attention on the war-destroyed uncle, and the cutter, and the self being born “through a tear/in the fabric” of the world. These unrhymed sonnets, as if one whole note struck repeatedly from beginning to finish, are technically superb, but the genius of Scar is its faithful translation of an ache. I know no other poet writing today whose capacity of perception is so sensitive to the harmonies of language and truth, sphere music composed by the difficult, nearly impossible, work of listening closely and hearing what is real. —David Keplinger, Another City