Renée M. Sgroi's ​In a Tension of Leaves and Binding

Reviewed by Kathryn MacDonald

(Guernica, 2024)

…
                            observe the body
 
as it worms between leaves, squeezes into folio, witness to textured
weave, to signatures bound in faux leather, in paperback, translations
between rows of beans, pods of verbal clauses dangling from stems
while fields lie fallow, forests burn perforated pages where words,
who paragraphs steak justified in columns, sliced cubes of letters
under crumble of Pink Pearl erasers as the system of nature,
like absented rivers, flows unmarked in the margins

(“systema”)

​In a Tension of Leaves and Binding is Renée M. Sgroi’s second poetry collection. With its varied forms (traditional and experimental) and play of voices (the poet’s and those of plants and animals), we enter a world both multilayered and accessible. Beautifully conceived and delivered, In a Tension of Leaves and Binding delights and intrigues.
 
Grounded in the garden, the poems are dirt under the fingernails, both real and metaphorical.  Reading In a Tension… we learn about the inhabitants of, and visitors to, the garden. We sense grief. And we learn about the gardener—her intense stare, touch, involvement—her leap into “other.”
 
To distinguish the voices of poet from “other,” Sgroi shifts margins. The poems on the left margin are in the poet’s voice. Others, she tells us, are “centred in the middle of the page, a sign that the imagined voice of the onion, the carrot, the grasshopper is bounded by the margins of what is knowable and what is not” (“In other words, two”).
 
She also plays with form in other ways. For example, the words in “Morphology” box a rectangle, a garden. Words in the seven “visitations” poems are scattered across the pages like birds visiting a feeder. Sgroi experiments with form in still other ways. In “MIXED METHODS EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF ACER SACCHARUM IN SITU, WITH PROGNOSIS BY ARBORISTS AND LINGUISTS ON THE FUTURE OF INTERSPECIES COMMUNICATION: AN INVESTIGATION,” Sgroi’s form mimics a research paper.
 
Some poems reveal, some stir questions like riddles in a caldron. Some poems, like the titular poem, connect us—mothers and daughters—to trees and leaves:

​…
sweetness is the sound a pen makes
or a spine’s crack when first opened
 
as a birth canal binds daughter, mother
into a book of doubled pages
 
and into the sweep a willow branch extends
low beside the river,
 
and snaps
 
in a tension of leaves and binding,”
…

​Many poems have names in Latin, Italian, Calabrese, Nishnaabemwin, and in everyday garden-speak, with references to the Linnaeus system of cataloguing (there is a glossary). This roots the poems in language and place, and in Sgroi’s skillful hands, they often become fun, riddles. When the title is a mystery, slowly, line-by-line, the reveal unwinds until I whisper “aha!” to the page:

​Solanum lycopersicum
 
my wet flesh
 
                   fattens
 
skin ripens under synesthetic sun
 
under leaves, fragrant
 
that pierce and etch tending hands
who try to stake me
 
                            I am
 
fruit of your passions
 
                            kiss
 
your mouth and tongue
 
                            satiating

This rich sensuousness runs like a thread throughout the collection.
 
While the subject may be the garden, the themes are varied. Most broadly, the collection is about birth and death, but especially the life in between. Certainly, the environment is a more specific theme, but it is subtle, only occasionally coming forward, as in “your town” and the prose poem “weirding.” I see Sgroi more concerned with expressing relationship—the gardener to the garden, and the garden to the gardener, but also plant-to-plant and creature-to-creature. Even her poems have conversations, as they do in “Cucumis sativus” and “cucumis sativus.”
​
And that garden-mother-daughter connection noted earlier underlines the way a garden is woven into our lives, as expressed in “irruptions”:

…a November
owl landed on our back fence in rain
 
perhaps lost, its young compass skewed
 
the owl, irrupting in the way children
push through their parents’ bedroom door

I love to learn things through poetry, and In a Tension of Leaves and Binding there is much to learn—often playfully, frequently about science. Take “processing oxygen”:

​imagine the body as a husk     processing oxygen
 
so that even     thought     is a side-effect of anaerobic
swallowing aerobic cells
 
mitochondrial. life’s building blocks hang yellow
 
crisp cold in November air as leaves that have ceased
producing chlorophyll     that have ceased.

​The leaps she takes:

​imagine the mind tangible as a spider’s silk
so gossamer it shines only in the right light,
 
and weaves a finite space between the air of two trees
as between two persons,
 
…

​In a Tension of Leaves and Binding is a book to love, to pleasure in, while enjoying the journey through and within Renée M. Sgroi’s garden. These poems will call you back to read again and again. 

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​Kathryn MacDonald’s poetry has been published in Room, FreeFall and other Canadian literary journals and anthologies, as well as internationally in the U.K., U.S., and other countries. She is the author of Far Side of the Shadow Moon: Enchantments (poetry chapbook), A Breeze You Whisper: Poems and Calla & Édourd (novel).