The Human Line by Ellen Bass

The Human Line Reviews

• 
  Julie

  I didn't mean to read this so quickly, not nearly all at once, in the space of an afternoon. But I could not stop. Ellen Bass takes the smallest moments—the ones we feel the most deeply for a fraction of a second and let slip away, because we just don't have the time or energy to consider what they mean—she takes those moments and enlarges them until we can walk right inside.
  
  Her mother, felled by some malady of an aged body, has left her home in an ambulance. Ellen steps into her mother's empty room and
  

  I lie in her bed
  like a fork on a folded napkin
  perfectly still and alone

  
  The poems that complete the first section of The Human Line bear witness to the dying and death of Ellen Bass's mother and in them, we see the poet contemplating her own decaying body and mortality. There is so much raw regret, disgust, and sweet love, all wrapped up in the same stanzas that at times it's hard to breathe. In Angels, her mother's caregiver pauses for a snack while the corpse of her charge lies prone in the next room and Ellen, who is present, sits and waits for the promised celestial shimmer of her mother's soul that never comes.

  Even as I pressed my palm
  to her heart to prove
  that it was still, I glanced up
  in the case the room did brighten.

  
  Part Three is devoted to a woman's experiences of birth and motherhood, the helplessness of the body and heart in the wake of children birthing and beginning to die the moment they leave your body.

  How can I begin
  to grasp it: the Earth
  in peril, my son's chest shining
  like polished burl. His spine
  visible beneath his skin.
  The way before he was born,
  when he was still
  safe in the belly's sheath,
  I could feee the exact shape
  of his just-formed foot
  pressing against the world. – from At the End of the Cenozoic Era

  
  On my way home, I stopped at a bench on a street corner to read. I took this with me to the beach and read it after a series of sun salutations. Before dinner, I put the cat on a leash and walked her around the driveway, The Human Line grasped, open, in one hand. The cat wriggled on the sun-warmed pavement and I read. I read as the onions sautéed, I read as I ate. I sat in the bath until the water cooled, reading aloud.
  
  I cried at over The Woman Who Killed My Cat
  

  But she kept telling me how
  sorry she was
  and I couldn't help myself,
  wrapped my arms around her.
  Of course she had to return my embrace.
  And maybe she neeed this too, to be forced
  against my grief, a owman
  who'd gotten up that morning, like me,
  not expecting to kill anything

  
  Were I a younger woman, perhaps Ellen Bass's poetry would not have connected the way it did. But she writes from a place I know, where the disappointments of love, body, family are exceeded only by feelings of tenderness for the same; where all politics really are personal.
  
  Bass reminds me to observe the routine and discover in it the precious, wondrous precious of the sublime.
  

  Gate C22
  
  At gate C22 in the Portland airport
  a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
  a woman arriving from Orange County.
  They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after
  the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons
  and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
  the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
  like he’d just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,
  like she’d been released at last from ICU, snapped
  out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down
  from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.
  
  Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.
  She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine
  her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish
  kisses like the ocean in the early morning,
  the way it gathers and swells, sucking
  each rock under, swallowing it
  again and again. We were all watching–
  passengers waiting for the delayed flight
  to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots,
  the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling
  sunglasses. We couldn’t look away. We could
  taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.
  
  But the best part was his face. When he drew back
  and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost
  as though he were a mother still open from giving birth,
  as your mother must have looked at you, no matter
  what happened after–if she beat you or left you or
  you’re lonely now–you once lay there, the vernix
  not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you
  as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.
  The whole wing of the airport hushed,
  all of us trying to slip into that woman’s middle-aged body,
  her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses,
  little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up.
• 
  Jenna

  This book, poet Ellen Bass's most popular collection on Goodreads, contains her oft-quoted poem "If You Knew." That poem exemplifies certain characteristics of Bass's verse that run all through this collection: a tendency to take a bird's-eye view of reality, gathering all the idiosyncratic individual experiences of the world's inhabitants into its wide, compassionate embrace; a loquacious free-verse style that builds momentum by pouring out lengthy, loping lists of quirkily specific images. The poems have an uneasy relationship with science, aping a scientist's compulsion to catalogue and name, but with a more relaxed, instinct-based approach to organization of ideas, coupled with an ecologically minded, mournful cognizance of the limitations of technological progress. "Though it was rash / and left chaos in its wake, / I clung to the only science I knew," says the speaker of "Discovering Fire," describing how a young woman throws herself into sexual exploration not as a means to satisfying the pleasure urge but a more complex existential need: "That was the way / I knew to know them -- / boys and men -- taking / that vulnerable root into my body, / the way a toddler puts everything -- pebbles, keys, plastic cars -- / into its mouth." Bass's attitude toward religion is just as down-to-earth and "homegrown" as her take on science, as in "Asking Directions in Paris," a poem that felicitously likens a passerby's too-rapid French speech to God's incomprehensible counsels: "God explaining / and explaining what you must do, / and all you can make out is a few / unconnected phrases, a word or two, a wave / in what you pray is the right direction." This talent for extended metaphor shines out a second time in the poem "Screaming": "Are we like stars in a constellation, / the lines between us not there at all, / just something we imagine when we draw Orion, / when really those stars burn / in three dimensions, thousands / of light-years apart."
• 
  Reluctant Anesthetist

  If You Knew
  What if you knew you'd be the last
  to touch someone?
  If you were taking tickets, for example,
  at the theater, tearing them,
  giving back the ragged stubs,
  you might take care to touch that palm,
  brush your fingertips
  along the life line's crease.
  
  When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
  too slowly through the airport, when
  the car in front of me doesn't signal,
  when the clerk at the pharmacy
  won't say Thank you, I don't remember
  they're going to die.
  
  A friend told me she'd been with her aunt.
  They'd just had lunch and the waiter,
  a young gay man with plum black eyes,
  joked as he served the coffee, kissed
  her aunt's powdered cheek when they left.
  Then they walked a half a block and her aunt
  dropped dead on the sidewalk.
  
  How close does the dragon's spume
  have to come? How wide does the crack
  in heaven have to split?
  What would people look like
  if we could see them as they are,
  soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
  reckless, pinned against time?
  
  The Thing Is
  
  to love life, to love it even
  when you have no stomach for it
  and everything you've held dear
  crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
  your throat filled with the silt of it.
  When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
  thickening the air, heavy as water
  more fit for gills than lungs;
  when grief weights you like your own flesh
  only more of it, an obesity of grief,
  you think, How can a body withstand this?
  Then you hold life like a face
  between your palms, a plain face,
  no charming smile, no violet eyes,
  and you say, yes, I will take you
  I will love you, again.
  
  Relax
  
  Bad things are going to happen.
  Your tomatoes will grow a fungus
  and your cat will get run over.
  Someone will leave the bag with the ice cream
  melting in the car and throw
  your blue cashmere sweater in the drier.
  Your husband will sleep
  with a girl your daughter’s age, her breasts spilling
  out of her blouse. Or your wife
  will remember she’s a lesbian
  and leave you for the woman next door. The other cat–
  the one you never really liked–will contract a disease
  that requires you to pry open its feverish mouth
  every four hours. Your parents will die.
  No matter how many vitamins you take,
  how much Pilates, you’ll lose your keys,
  your hair and your memory. If your daughter
  doesn’t plug her heart
  into every live socket she passes,
  you’ll come home to find your son has emptied
  the refrigerator, dragged it to the curb,
  and called the used appliance store for a pick up–drug money.
  There’s a Buddhist story of a woman chased by a tiger.
  When she comes to a cliff, she sees a sturdy vine
  and climbs half way down. But there’s also a tiger below.
  And two mice–one white, one black–scurry out
  and begin to gnaw at the vine. At this point
  she notices a wild strawberry growing from a crevice.
  She looks up, down, at the mice.
  Then she eats the strawberry.
  So here’s the view, the breeze, the pulse
  in your throat. Your wallet will be stolen, you’ll get fat,
  slip on the bathroom tiles of a foreign hotel
  and crack your hip. You’ll be lonely.
  Oh taste how sweet and tart
  the red juice is, how the tiny seeds
  crunch between your teeth.
  
  From The Small Country
  
  Unique, I think, is the Scottish tartle , that hesitation
  when introducing someone whose name you’ve forgotten.
  
  And what could capture cafuné , the Brazilian Portuguese way to say
  running your fingers, tenderly, through someone’s hair?
  
  Is there a term in any tongue for choosing to be happy?
  
  And where is speech for the block of ice we pack in the sawdust of our hearts?
  
  What appellation approaches the smell of apricots thickening the air
  when you boil jam in early summer?
  
  
• 
  Caitlin

  "What if you knew you'd be the last
  to touch someone?
  If you were taking tickets, for example,
  at the theater, tearing them,
  giving back the ragged stubs,
  you might take care to touch that palm,
  brush your fingertips
  along the life line's crease.
  
  When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
  too slowly through the airport, when
  the car in front of me doesn't signal,
  when the clerk at the pharmacy
  won't say Thank you, I don't remember
  they're going to die.
  
  A friend told me she'd been with her aunt.
  They'd just had lunch and the waiter,
  a young gay man with plum black eyes,
  joked as he served the coffee, kissed
  her aunt's powdered cheek when they left.
  Then they walked half a block and her aunt
  dropped dead on the sidewalk.
  
  How close does the dragon's spume
  have to come? How wide does the crack
  in heaven have to split?
  What would people look like
  if we could see them as they are,
  soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
  reckless, pinned against time?"
  
  -- "If You Knew"
• 
  Sarah Schantz

  Oh.My.Goddess. SWOON. The Human Line by Ellen Bass is at once a book of prayers for the ordinary household as it is a prayer for the world, the universe, the cosmos, while simultaneously tracking the notion of time--tracking the time before there was such a concept at all, shadowing that time to the time when it all began, stalling out when time too just needed a solid jumpstart, then divining the knowledge that time will end, and then sitting with grief personified in a rocking chair when it does end, then looking out the window to see the time that is outside of time.
  
  If I was told that Bass simply translated a twist of DNA when she composed this collection, I would believe. This woman writes my kind of poetry. In fact, it's as if she were writing these poems only for me, and yet I know that's not true because of how I MUST share them all with EVERYONE I love.
  
  Her narratives sing to me; they echo the death of my own mother; they reflect all the ways in which I've made love, and shape all the positions I've had to perform to give birth; the slash through a white canvas to count and atone for all the mistakes I've made, as they also attempt to recollect my loss in a Mason jar as if these things, these people, these strange ghosts will burn yellow in the night like fireflies. Bass wrote this book of poetry, I believe, because she knew I was scheduled to have a hysterectomy one week from day; she knows what sacrifices I have made. With her words, and the lines she forms upon the page, she says to me simply: Sarah, I see you.
  
  I doubt this review will help anyone determine whether or not they will read this collection, and that's a shame because you really should, but I also don't know how else to "review" The Human Line. Especially, not right now as I sit at my desk eating a cheese burger my husband made for me on this first night of the new year--2016. So I'm just doing the best that I can. I am telling the truth.
• 
  Peycho Kanev

  In Praise of Four-letter Words
  
  We yell “shit”
  when the egg carton slips
  and the ivory globes
  splatter on blue tile.
  And when someone leaves you
  bruised as a dropped pear, you spit
  “that fucker, fucking bastard, motherfucker”.
  And if you just got fired, the puppy
  swallowed a two-inch nail, or
  your daughter needs another surgery,
  you might walk around murmuring
  “fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck”
  under your breath like reciting a rosary.
  
  “Cock” and “cunt”—we spew them out
  as though they were offal,
  that vulnerable bare skin
  of the penis, that swaying it does
  like a slender reed in a pond, the vulva
  with its delicate mauve or taupe
  or cinnamon fluted petals.
  You’d think we despise
  the way they slide together,
  can’t bear all those nerves
  bunched up close as angels
  seething on the head of a pin.
  
  And “suck”, our “yes”
  to the universe, first hunger, whole
  mammalian tribe of damp newborns
  held in contempt for the urgent rooting,
  the nubbly feel of the nipple in the mouth,
  fine spray on the soft palate.
  
  When life cracks us
  like a broken tooth,
  when it wears us down
  like the tread of old tires,
  isn’t this what we cry for?
  To bring another’s body
  into our body, whether through our mouths
  or that other mouth—to be taken in?
  
  Maybe all that shouting
  is shouting to God, to the universe,
  or anyone who can hear us.
  In lockdown within our own skins
  we’re banging on the bars with tin spoons,
  screaming in the only language strong
  enough to convey the shock
  of our shameful need—the pissing,
  cocksucking animal of me begging
  to the crapping, cunt-licking animal of you.
  “Fuck!”—we look around us
  in terrified amazement—
  “God damn! God damn! Holy shit!”
  
• 
  Robert Vaughan

  Welcome to the rare experience of being stunned awake by poems you dare to read. Welcome to your skin tingling while you can barely breathe through these, they are that phenomenal. If you have not read Ellen Bass, and you probably did in places like the New Yorker, or The Sun, but perhaps you didn't even know, (because she is too darn humble to let you know), do not wait a moment longer. This is a poet whose work is timely, and ageless both. Whose work makes us stop taking our relationships for granted. Who fine tunes the most inexplicable of sensory details, readies them for us to ingest. Bravo, Ellen Bass! The world is made better with your poems in it.
• 
  Laura Leaney

  Simply some of the most beautiful heart-stopping poems I've read in a very long time.
• 
  Whitney Ellison

  I love Ellen Bass’ poetry. After reading her stunning Mules of Love, and the high bar it set, this collection did not disappoint. My favorite poem in the collection and perhaps top 10 of all time is Gate C22.
• 
  David

  Fantastic collection all around, but the stretch from “If you knew” to “God’s Grief” is powerful, and shows what poetry can pull off.
  
  Wonderful work.
• 
  Joseph Lee

  Bass reflects on her mother’s death, evolution, and of course love in her poems. She is highly original and fun to read. Endearing and touching, Bass understands the human condition in the regularities of daily living.
• 
  Fenixbird SandS

  Author's web link:
  http://ellenbass.com/pray_for_peace.php
  
  
  Pray for Peace
  by Ellen Bass (from The Human Line)
  
  Pray to whomever you kneel down to:
  Jesus nailed to his wooden or plastic cross,
  his suffering face bent to kiss you,
  Buddha still under the bo tree in scorching heat,
  Adonai, Allah. Raise your arms to Mary
  that she may lay her palm on our brows,
  to Shekhina, Queen of Heaven and Earth,
  to Inanna in her stripped descent.
  
  Then pray to the bus driver who takes you to work.
  On the bus, pray for everyone riding that bus,
  for everyone riding buses all over the world.
  Drop some silver and pray.
  
  Waiting in line for the movies, for the ATM,
  for your latte and croissant, offer your plea.
  Make your eating and drinking a supplication.
  Make your slicing of carrots a holy act,
  each translucent layer of the onion, a deeper prayer.
  
  To Hawk or Wolf, or the Great Whale, pray.
  Bow down to terriers and shepherds and Siamese cats.
  Fields of artichokes and elegant strawberries.
  
  Make the brushing of your hair
  a prayer, every strand its own voice,
  singing in the choir on your head.
  As you wash your face, the water slipping
  through your fingers, a prayer: Water,
  softest thing on earth, gentleness
  that wears away rock.
  
  Making love, of course, is already prayer.
  Skin, and open mouths worshipping that skin,
  the fragile cases we are poured into.
  
  If you're hungry, pray. If you're tired.
  Pray to Gandhi and Dorothy Day.
  Shakespeare. Sappho. Sojourner Truth.
  
  When you walk to your car, to the mailbox,
  to the video store, let each step
  be a prayer that we all keep our legs,
  that we do not blow off anyone else's legs.
  Or crush their skulls.
  And if you are riding on a bicycle
  or a skateboard, in a wheelchair, each revolution
  of the wheels a prayer as the earth revolves:
  less harm, less harm, less harm.
  
  And as you work, typing with a new manicure,
  a tiny palm tree painted on one pearlescent nail
  or delivering soda or drawing good blood
  into rubber-capped vials, writing on a blackboard
  with yellow chalk, twirling pizzas--
  
  With each breath in, take in the faith of those
  who have believed when belief seemed foolish,
  who persevered. With each breath out, cherish.
  
  Pull weeds for peace, turn over in your sleep for peace,
  feed the birds, each shiny seed
  that spills onto the earth, another second of peace.
  Wash your dishes, call your mother, drink wine.
  
  Shovel leaves or snow or trash from your sidewalk.
  Make a path. Fold a photo of a dead child
  around your VISA card. Scoop your holy water
  from the gutter. Gnaw your crust.
  Mumble along like a crazy person, stumbling
  your prayer through the streets.
  
  
  http://ellenbass.com/pray_for_peace.php
  
• 
  Nina

  
  In an online interview, Ellen Bass says that “poetry is the way I pay attention, appreciate, give praise, struggle, grieve, rage, and pray.” Her poetry readily accomplishes all of that. She makes creative use of metaphor as she explores relationships of all kinds, including those of mankind to the environment.
  
  The book opens with end-of-life poems about her mother. In "Sleeping in My Mother´s Bed,” Bass writes stark lines which evoke the knowledge that life is about to change:
  
  lie in her bed
  Like a fork on a folded napkin,
  Perfectly still and alone.
  
  With this perfect simile, Bass captures the isolating emotional state after her mother left by ambulance. Any one of us can picture the image of that fork left on the napkin. Bass invites the reader in, makes the scene immediate and real. Another example of her skill in doing this is the poem “Gate C22", where Bass writes about a couple embracing at an airport gate. She brings the reader into the scene as well as the other people in the airport.
  
  The whole wing of the airport hushed,
  all of us trying to slip into that woman´s middle-aged body,
  her plaid bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses,
  little gold earrings, tilting our heads up.
  
  I read those lines and I wanted to be that woman, I wanted to have that kind of attention lavished on me.
  
  Bass makes good use of humor in many of her poems. In “Asking Directions in Paris” she writes of knowing just enough French to ask for directions when in Paris, but not enough to understand the response. I laughed aloud while reading this poem, and I quoted part of it on a recent visit to Spain, where I had a similar experience while trying to impress family members by speaking Spanish.
  
  Their universal appeal makes these poems to read and re-read, and to share.
  
• 
  Donna

  I have always like Ellen Bass's poetry, but this is her strongest work to date. The book is rich in metaphor and poetic device. She is witty, thoughtful and uses considerable word play to ask what are often difficult questions about the paradoxes of being human, of death and life, job and sorry. She opens with some extremely moving poetry about her dying mother and her life as a child growing up over the family liquor store. But by the end of the she looks at such global issues as war, the environment, genetic engineering, and the possible extinction of humanity. In this book, Ellen shows herself to be an intelligent, philosophical, mature poet with a finely honed poetic craft.
• 
  Eileen

  I discovered Ellen Bass last fall. It was September 21, the International Day of Peace and I was on line ordering a copy of THE SUN magazine. After placing my order, I explored the web site a bit and by chance (or karma) found Ellen's poem, PRAY FOR PEACE. Her poetry left me shaking and I knew I wanted to read more.
  
  You will find her plea for peace and so much more in THE HUMAN LINE. It is an exquisite collection with an awesome range of topics and emotions. Ellen examines the human condition through a trenchant lens, but always with love.
  
  
• 
  Laura

  Human capacity for the use of words is really amazing, and the way she tells short stories about her life connects with the reader at a very deep but basic level: We are all human, we all have gone through most of the situations that she describes in her poems. Only, we are not able to describe them so beautifully. We probably haven't even consider that asking for directions in Paris could be turned into poetry, and yet, she does. And expresses it for us. And makes our daily common lives a little bit more meaningful and poetic.
• 
  AJ Nolan

  I meant to only read a poem or two before bed, but the book pulled me in and wouldn't let me go. Just when I thought the grief of the first section was too much, and I'd have to lay it down, she shifted, and in the third section Ellen Bass found a way to write directly to my soul. I am sad. Read it so fast, because now it is done, but then again, I can revisit it again and again, lingering over the words.
• 
  Michael

  This is a fine book of poetry, one that does not have a weak poem in it. Topic range from caring for a sick mother to love and family to death--the commonplaces of poems, yet so beautifully and skillfully crafted that it makes real those universal human experiences for the individual reader. This is poetry at its best, and I highly recommend this book.
• 
  Julene

  Many good poems, especially love the ones about the state of the world. This book also contains the popular poem "Gate C22" which captures a kiss at an airport gate so powerful, so beautiful.
• 
  Andrea MacPherson

  3.5 stars.
  
  Loved many of these poems, but in some sections there was a sameness to the voice/tone/language.
• 
  Jason Hess

  So good.
• 
  L.

  Reading these poems - reflections and meditations on our relationship to mortality (on a scale both great and small) - during the trying, uncertain days of a pandemic has been no less than a balm to my sanity.
  
  It's not like I needed to be reminded that I'm going to die someday - perhaps even sooner than later. But every story about death is also, more importantly, a story about life. These poems are that sentiment, stretched to a taut and emotionally powerful limit.
• 
  Charity Yost Reed

  A dear friend and fellow writer gave me The Human Line as a Christmas gift in 2017, and I immediately began reading a poem from it each day. Bass' subject matter is so deep and her images are so detailed that I copied several poems from this collection into my favorites notebook. I'd love to read more of her works, and I will also reread and recommend this one.
• 
  Lynn Tait

  Rather interesting read. Took me a bit to warm up to it. I read so much poetry that certain styles don't resonate immediately. I have to sit with it awhile. Honest writing though. I've followed Bass within journals and magazines for years so thought I'd try her books. I think also I've been quite taken with Ada Limon's poetry which may be clouding my judgement.
  
• 
  Linda Albert

  Ellen Bass is a consummate poet. Everything she writes is right on. Her talent to capture the moment, and find the words and emotions to allow me to be right there is a marvel. If you haven't discovered her work yet, you are missing something special in the world of writing and of poetry.
  Linda Albert
• 
  Ina

  Mundane everyday words and sentence structures just broken up into verses isn't my idea of a good time when it comes to poetry.
  
  It picked up a bit for me in part three. From then on, there were a few verses here and there that tugged on my heart-brain but there wasn't a single poem that was moving for me from start to finish.