Indigo by Ellen Bass

Indigo Reviews

• 
  Julie

  Loving, angry, raw, mournful, sensual, playful . . . Ellen Bass hits all the notes so that you feel them fill your lungs, your belly, your heart. Indigo touches down frequently into a landscape of grief: a mother's death, a wife's illness, an ex-husband's failings, but there are also moments of great delight and quiet joy. The natural world, the vulnerable, changing, beautiful human body, the poet's regrets and delights as she enters this later phase of life - all are rendered in exquisite, visceral detail.
  
  One of my favorite poets for the permission she gives me to revel and grieve in all the ways so particular to being a woman, Ellen Bass has touched me deeply once again.
• 
  Ron Mohring

  I really needed this book right now. These poems are so skillfully honed they feel effortlessly made, with a voice that's intimate, attentive to wonder and to the smallest details. How lucky to be alive and attuned, to be able to craft such necessary poems with grief and love and awe and--well, gratitude. I'm going back to read all her previous work.
• 
  David Abrams

  Some of these poems--nay, many of them--were like that logo on Arm and Hammer baking soda: a bicep flexed, uncurled, a hammer coming down, hard, on the top of my head, leaving me dazed and dazzled and with a head wreathed in chirping birds, all of them beak-clicking and wing-chattering to me with their beauty. That's a long way of saying I loved these stanzas.
• 
  Kelly Thomas

  Such softness and suffering in the ways we are ravaged and replenished by love. So many beautiful poems including "Sous Chef" "Ode to Fat" and "Sing Your Fingers Into the Darkness of my Fur"
• 
  Alex Johnson

  Good writing magnifies the ordinary, and that's exactly what Ellen Bass does her. From the memories of loved ones to marriages to a grizzly bear to taking the dog out to pee, Bass finds the beauty in it all. "You may have to break / your heart, but it isn't nothing / to know even one moment alive." She generously offers a peek into her own life, the loveliness and the ugliness.
  
  Her writing shows that poetry can be striking without being inscrutable. I found myself struck by the ordinary observations Bass makes so tangible: the love of someone else making decisions ("Sous-Chef"), tragedy making beauty sweeter ("Any Common Desolation"), the treasure of lasting love ("Getting into Bed on a December Night"), the despair of seeing someone experience something that you cannot grasp ("The Kitchen Counter"), the glimpse into what could have been ("Indigo").
  
  Guess I'm going to read the rest of her books now.
• 
  Adrian Alvarez

  One of the most affecting poetry books I have read in a while. Also very accessible, for anyone who worries poetry just isn't for them. The craft work in these poems is exceptional and nearly invisible for the reader. I had to re-read some of them several times just to figure out how they worked so powerfully. The first read some of them were just magical. Like, they magically wetted my eyes and made me think of my mortality all day.
  
  Here's one of my favorites:
  
  Taking My Old Dog Out to Pee before Bed
  
  Zeke's hips are too ground down
  to lift a leg, so he just stands there. We both
  just stand, looking into the darkness.
  The moon silvers his thinning fur.
  Orion strides across the heavens, his own dog
  trotting at his heel. And a great live oak reaches over
  from the neighbor's yard, dense black limbs
  silhouetted against a paler sky. Single voluptuous
  remnant of forests. Can a tree be lonely?
  Zeke tips up his muzzle, scent streaming
  through two hundred million olfactory cells
  as he reads the illuminated manuscript of night-
  raccoons prowling down the street, who's in heat
  or just out for a stroll. Handsome still,
  he reminds me of an aging movie star with his striking
  white eyebrows and square jaw. He always
  had an urbane elegance, a gentleman
  who could carry off satin lapels and a silver-tipped cane.
  Tonight an ambulance wails. Someone not so far away
  is frightened, in pain, trying to live or trying to die.
  And then it's quiet again. No birds. No wind.
  We don't speak. We just wait, alive together,
  until one of us turns back to the door
  and the other follows.
  
  
  This poem really moved me. So much that I sought out Ellen Bass' twitter account just to see if she had posted any photos of Zeke. I was not disappointed. Well, a little disappointed. RIP to that handsome little guy.
• 
  Caitlin

  "There was no beauty
  when I sat at the kitchen table, breaking
  
  open the pinkish capsules, dividing the granules
  so she could swallow the precise promise,
  
  where she lay in the backyard wrapped in quilts
  every night staring up through the branches, stars
  
  flecked in the black-veined sky.
  There was no time
  
  out there. Or time was large enough to hold her.
  One moon slowly rolling over. I waited
  
  long as I could. Then we began.
  A bath. Tea. Litanies
  
  of consolation, though she was inconsolable.
  I rubbed her feet before the door
  
  which led to a sleepless night or
  to the night of us split
  
  into the cells of our separate dreams. Through the window,
  the patience of trees.
  
  I was so tired. I told myself she wasn't dead.
  She wasn't dying. I called it the hellhole.
  
  It's only with distance
  we can bear the beauty
  
  of that much burning, the light
  having traveled so long, so far."
  
  -- This Was the Door
  
  
  
• 
  Amorak Huey

  You’re going to have to excuse me. After spending time in these lovely, smart poems, I am going to spend the rest of my life staring vacantly into the middle distance, consumed by my mortality and the temporariness of love.
• 
  Isla McKetta

  Exquisite.
• 
  Laura Sackton

  Absolutely loved this. So beautiful, so honest, so celebratory, sad and humble and full of joy and full of pain. Just lovely. Can't wait to read more of Bass's work.
• 
  Sue

  “The patience of trees.” Sit and savor that for a minute. Ellen Bass’s poetry continues to be a wonder to me. As a teacher, she teaches poets to create “moments,” and she does that well in this latest collection, whether it’s slipping into bed with her wife, taking her old dog out to pee, or living through an ultrasound after a suspicious mammogram. She mixes these moments with heavy and light elements to create concoctions that take my breath away. In just five lines in “On My Father’s Illness,” she captures the essence of a woman losing her husband, wishing she could still be like other wives and sit in the passenger seat again. In “I look over and there she is,” she speaks of her lover’s illness and lurking death but ends with “Ice/melting in my glass topples/with a little clink.” I can hear that ice. I am there in that moment. So many wonderful moments fill this book.
• 
  Kaye

  This was so good. I loved many of the poems and a few of them nearly made me cry.
• 
  Mary Beth Umholtz

  Fantastic poems about love, life, domesticity and beauty in the world. Ellen Bass is my new favorite poet. I highly recommend this little collection.
• 
  Kristy

  Oh, Ellen. Light of my life.
  
  This collection feels different than her others to me, almost more distinctive. Mules of Love and Like A Beggar feel, tonally, very similar to me. Younger, almost, although she was already married twice with grown children when she wrote them. The Human Line processes her mothers death, and then this - Indigo - feels like such a natural progression after that. It's not the mourning of the recently heartbroken, but the reflections that only come with distance. And yet - that distance doesn't make her poetry any less intimate, any less urgent or deeply felt.
  
  "Taking My Old Dog Out to Pee before Bed" and "Ode to Zeke" commemorate her aging dog. "Fungus on Fallen Alder at Lookout Creek" details the rotting of a tree. "Any Common Desolation" brings it all together - the despair of life, the hope found in its small details.
  
  There are love poems to her wife ("Ode to Fat," "Getting Into Bed on a December Night," "Marriage"), but again, these are not the poems of honeymoon-struck lovers but of the long haul - the love through sickness, health, anger, fear.
  
  This visceral
  bloody union that is love, but
  beyond love. Beyond charm and delight
  the way you yourself are past charm and delight.
  This is the shucked meat of love, the alleys and broken
  glass of love, the dizzy, hoarse cry, the stubborn hunger.
  (Marriage, p36)
  
  She writes about growing up - about assault ("Because what We Do Does Not Die") and her father's illness ("Failure"). Shopping with her mother ("The Orange-and-White High-Heeled Shoes") and then eventually, with a very different tone, shopping with her own daughter ("Indigo").
  
  I can just never get enough of Ellen Bass and already look forward to pouring over all of these poems again. One read through (let alone one measly goodreads review) couldn't possibly do them all justice.
  
• 
  Philip Kenner

  Ellen Bass has my heart. My current favorite poem of all time, “I Could Touch It,” lives in this collection.
  
  Bass writes of and in the earth. Her poems are testaments to humanity’s bizarre ability to be completely in the moment and totally somewhere else, all at the same time. There are fires and oceans and clouds and roots and birds and bees and blood and bone, and Bass makes it her job to notice and chew them all.
  
  Also, this book is sexy. The cover may already suggest that, but it bears repeating. Some of the poems in this book are downright horny, and we’re better for it.
  
  I took two of Ellen Bass’ poetry classes over the last six months, and she is as luminous and generous a thinker as her poetry would suggest. I’d recommend the classes heartily to anyone interested.
  
  I am including snippets of my favorite poems below, in no particular order. Don’t read further if this counts as a spoiler:
  
  ROSES - “Death woke me each morning / with its bird impersonation.”
  
  ODE TO ZEKE - “I’ll fry you a fish. I’ll sit by your bowl. / Eat from my hand. I have nowhere to go.”
  
  BECAUSE - “I lay there with the baby whimpering in my arms, / both of us wide awake in the darkness.”
  
  FAILURE - “This was my first / entrance into the land of failure, a country / I would visit so often / it would begin to feel like home.”
  
  And, of course, I COULD TOUCH IT: “As sage gives its scent when you crush it. As stone / is hard. They were happy and I could touch it.”
• 
  Uma Dwivedi

  such gentle & affectionate attention with bass, though she takes herself none too seriously. such a careful looking at the world, the body, its reverence of pleasure, poems in praise of the small beats of light dragging u from one dark day to another. poems also about marriage, how love ages and knows itself and fears; loves still. some of the poems felt a bit too dull (though much of what bass sings of is love of the quotidian, so i understand), but it’s a beautiful collection, tender like meat near the bone
• 
  Courtney LeBlanc

  A collection of poems that focus on aging (and all its injustices!), marriage, family, children, learning, and growing.
  
  from The Small Country: "And how even touch itself cannot mean the same to both of us, / even in this small country of our bed, / even in this language with only two native speakers."
  
  from Experiment in Empathy: "But sometimes it's too much to ask / a person to inhabit / the strange region of a foreign heart."
  
  from Ode to Fat: "Stoke the furnace / of stomach and load the vessels. Darling, / drench yourself in opulent oil, / the lamp of your body glowing."
• 
  Erin

  21/31
  
  My first Ellen Bass. I get the hype. It took me a rather long time to get here, but I am glad I am here. What a lovely collection.
  
  Instead of quoting for the remainder of the Sealey Challenge, for which I am woefully behind in posting (and some in reading), I am just going to list the poems I loved:
  
  From Indigo--Ellen Bass
  "Black Coffee"
  "Taking My Old Dog to Pee Before Bed"
  "The Kitchen Counter"
  "Not Dead Yet"
  "Fungus on Fallen Alder at Lookout Creek"
  "I look over and there she is"
  "Indigo"
• 
  Dorothy Mahoney

  From a 5 line poem like "On my Father's Illness" to the 60 line title poem "Indigo", Ellen Bass
  flexes her poetic muscles in this collection. "Ode to Zeke" her praise of her aging dog ends: "I'll fry you a fish. I'll sit by your bowl./ Eat from my hand. I have nowhere to go." For Ellen Bass fans, this
  is an awaited book with several odes and praise poems. Take your time, at this point in time, there's nowhere to go...
• 
  Edgar Trevizo

  I adore Ellen. That’s where I want to start. I’ve read her three previous books countless times, in love. I’ve translated her to spanish for my friends to enjoy. I just love her. But this book. It doesn’t even seems like her writing. Something very important is missing here. Adam Zagajewski says that every poem has to contain the whole world in it. That’s her previous books. This one doesn’t even contain a small town.
• 
  Josette

  An incredible book. I have read it through twice, some of the poems three or four times. The intimacy conveyed with a single phrase like “I rubbed her feet” or “oh, you were lean that terrifying year” kept hitting me over and over. I’d think about my own marriage, my own father or mother, and feel wistful and loving because the poems brought me to that tender bruise. “I’m old / enough to know there’s nothing / we love without incurring / the debt of grief.”
• 
  Quoth the Robyn

  Bass's language, words, and concepts challenged me in remarkable ways and I found myself constantly learning throughout the collection. However, I felt that there was a lack of connectivity between the poems and it felt like I was watching two or three different stories taking place without much depth into them. I still loved the poems I encountered and they were each beautiful individually, but as a whole, there was something missing tying everything together.
• 
  Mary Camille Thomas

  A gift of the pandemic was that Santa Cruz poet Ellen Bass took her “living room craft talks” online to Zoom, where people all over the world, including me right here in Santa Cruz, can learn from a master. I have to admit, I hadn’t read her poetry before I took the class, and now I’m a fan. “It isn’t nothing to know even one moment alive,” she writes in the poem “Any Common Desolation, and this collection woke me up to many moments of being alive. Highly recommended!
• 
  Amie Whittemore

  A very beautiful collection of poems about long love, (long lesbian love in particular), about life's troubles and regrets, about forays into the country of illness, about recovery, about gratitude, about sex and its tethers. Bass's style is straightforward yet musical, accessible in a good way--she points to the heart's matters and say here, this is what matters. In other words, a great gift for the folks in your life who need poetry but who are afraid of poetry that "doesn't make sense."
• 
  Amy

  Emily Dickinson once said, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” This book is most definitely poetry - poetry that is accessible and real, poetry that is all about paying attention, poetry about love and the ways it both completes us and tears us apart and how utterly lost we would be without love in our lives. Powerful, tender, honest, and beautifully, skillfully written.
  
• 
  Lisa

  I enjoyed Indigo, Ellen Bass's latest collection. As usual, her thoughtfulness, her exquisite attention to detail and lovely sensual/sensory imagery shine through in every poem, in the tradition of Sharon Olds and Adrienne Rich. Bass knows how to deliver an emotional gut-punch. I do wish the poet relied less on similes and more on muscular diction and syntax, as in "Enough" or "Blame," two of the book's standout pieces. A number of lines felt a bit flat and the language a bit familiar to me in other pieces. Even though I'm a person with numerous tattoos myself, I'll admit I was slightly disappointed in the choice of cover photos. Though I admire the quality of the tattoo sleeve itself, for a book that is so much about the experiences of women, whether as ageing lovers, mothers and daughters or grandmothers, to have a naked male torso on the cover (with that nipple staring you in the face) feels as if the focus has been unfairly shifted. Perhaps my expectations for this book were unreasonably high, since I loved Bass's previous books, especially The Human Line, so much, or maybe my taste in poetry is changing, as I move away from the confessional narrative/lyric poem and seek out writing that challenges these established conventions.
• 
  Claire Scott

  Ellen Bass is a truly wonderful poet, grounded in the physical details of the world with a stunning wonder and attention to specificity. She uses fairly simple language, but her poems still paint images of complexity. Some of my favorites were "Indigo," "Any Common Desolation," "Pushing," and "The Long Recovery."