A Risk Worth Taking

A Rough Deliverance: Collected Poems 1983-2013 by Nancy Bevilaqua

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Almost by definition, good poetry requires vulnerability. Vulnerability inherently involves risk. It is tempting, at first blush, to suspect that a writer who is admittedly only a “sporadic” poet would be foolish to publish 30 years of poetry, let alone 30 years of poetry with intensely confessional content. After all, one of the benefits of becoming a professional is leaving your “early work” behind and reveling in your success, right? While each reader of A Rough Deliverance will judge for themselves whether the risks Nancy Bevilaqua undertakes in this endeavor are reasonable and efficacious, no one reading her engaging and intriguing Preface can argue that she is anything other than fully aware of both the gravity and potential pitfalls of this self-described “mystery tour.” She knows exactly what the hell she’s doing.

While there is definitely a discernible maturity of vision, voice and technique in her more recent works, do not skip the early stuff: the very first poem, The Act, in fact is both as passionate and stirring as you’d expect and surprisingly sophisticated in its execution. Similarly Bevilaqua’s sixth sonnet, Daddy Shows Up in a Dream as a Drunken Sailor, is remarkably direct with an almost epiphanic clarity. The Monkey Tree, Billie Holiday c. 1940, all the Holding Breath poems and Maadi Gedida are especially compelling highlights of the rest of the work. By the end of the collection, you realize that Bevilaqua’s early works are more like U2’s Boy or Nirvana’s Bleach than the sitcoms or toothpaste commercials of a now famous movie star. The risk was well worth taking. In total, A Rough Deliverance is a solid and moving collection.




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