Rose Mary Boehm’s poetry explores our world through a lens of disorienting contrasts: past and present, youth and age, male and female, escape and entrapment, real and surreal.
In The Rain Girl, Rose Mary Boehm’s poetry explores our world through a lens of disorienting contrasts: past and present, youth and age, male and female, escape and entrapment, real and surreal. Through the current of time, we see sharp images of wartime Europe and fairy tales, violence and dreams and, through it all, a love ever-lost but ever-seeking. The speaker in these psychologically-fraught poems becomes “the note between the / harmonies, the breach between severed limbs, and the twilight / between worlds.” And though the ground continually shifts beneath readers’ feet, they walk wide-eyed through this collection, willing travelers in times they can never quite trust due to the transience of the subconscious. As the poem “Haunting” tells us: “the time that passes between / lighting and thunder, / that’s where you’ll find me.” It’s also where you’ll find yourself – fascinated from start to finish.
Lusty, gutsy, pensive, these poems ruminate and celebrate, mourn and question. No topic is taboo as Boehm dances through heirlooms and ancestors, past water drag- on and phoenix, as she traverses the horrors of war and the hungry ghosts of wayward children. Boehm’s depth and breadth come from a lifetime that crossed continents, bursting with a nimbleness of wordplay possible only when the writer is at home in several languages.
