One Finch Singing by Emily Ransdell

Like a cup of spiced tea, or like a stiff dram of whisky in an ice-cold highball glass on a rainy night when your faith has seized up inside you, the poems in Emily Ransdell’s debut collection, One Finch Singing, arrive like comfort from a friend.

My grandmother had just died. I needed poetry. I needed a poet who had navigated her share of grief. Which is why Ransdell’s poem “Vigil” slapped me with the reminder to be goddamn alive. In “Vigil” the poem shifts attention outward from the speaker’s father’s hospital room, where he lies dying, to the parking lot’s far edge. There, Ransdell describes: silhouettes of linden trees where earlier / I had found solace. / Then they were alive // with bees, deep vibrations quaking the blooms. Until morning, when daylight will rouse them // to finish what they’ve begun.

Death is taking its time, Ransdell writes in this understated poem. While death is all around and threatening not only the speaker’s parents but also a dear friend and husband, Ransdell stays ever attentive to the natural world around her. The poems throughout the collection are interrupted by blossoms and birdsong, aiding the collection’s arced movement through grief.

One Finch Singing addresses the basic tenets of life—love and loss—through poems that are both accessible and worthy of return. The collection as a whole moves from the familial poems of Section I, which explore youth, the loss of one’s parents, and religion and questions of faith, to the larger environmental griefs felt in Section II, including the threat of wildfire and impacts of Covid-19.

In “First Wind, Then Fire,” Ransdell writes: I don’t know where / smoke ends and I begin. Section II opens with the collection’s title poem, “One Finch Singing,” a poem which offers an ancient perspective, where: one finch singing meant an end to grief. But the same section ends with the terrible fires of 2020 and the crickets, shrouded in smoke, which have mistaken / this mid-day gray for dusk / and have begun to sing.

Grief, and our inability to grieve in recent years, is addressed expertly throughout the collection. Section III shifts to the intimate fear of losing a lifelong marriage partner and aging turned inward, as the speaker wrestles with her own health in the poem, “Heart Speaks.”

One finch singing meant an end to grief.

Ransdell’s strong lyrical voice finishes the collection, where themes of faith and the restorative quality of nature return. In the collection’s penultimate poem, “The Tree,” a poem in which the speaker waits under a tree as if the gods still had / a message to send, even the tree itself, while losing its yellow leaves, contains its own holiness and power, like an unkempt god / neither dead nor living, but dormant. // Waiting, like the other gods, / for its turn.

Ransdell’s poems remind this reader that we carry our griefs quiet, on the inside, whether our griefs be private family matters or larger shared ecological concerns. This life contains many echoes of what’s lost but contains hope and a grand love for what’s ahead— as Ransdell states in the collection’s final poem, “Kingdom”— for those willing to stop and lick the holy pollen from the air.

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Jennifer Dorner’s poetry has been published in Prairie Schooner, New Ohio Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Sugar House Review, San Pedro River Review, Tar River Poetry, The Inflectionist Review, Cloudbank, and other journals and anthologies. In 2019 Dorner won the Kay Snow Award for Poetry and placed first in two of the Oregon Poetry Association’s spring contests. In 2020 Dorner was long-listed for Palette Poetry’s Sappho prize. A Pushcart nominee, she is a past finalist for the Ruth Stone poetry prize. She holds an MFA from Pacific University and lives in Portland, OR.