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Vinland

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"So we mark/ ourselves. As road splits the village ....," writes Jamie Ross in the poem "Elope" from his collection, "Vinland," in which the theme of the drawn line as road, as lineage, as battle frontline, as crosshatch in the calendar of days works as leitmotif. Ross has written a collection of poems so marked by the scarring and resurrection of an "Easter ripped open" that it reminds us that if we could but recall the details of our own ancestry, our own drawing of a line as vividly as Ross does in "Vinland," we might create the life we had hoped to live but missed. The mesmerizing trajectory of many of Ross's poems straddle more than one reality like a Christmas in July. Let the deconstructionists deconstruct these poems; they will have split the lark. This book glides as mysteriously as any coracle carrying a corpse past the end of the line into a new world. This inaugural collection needs to be noted, celebrated, and studied for its deeply felt intuition. We are in the presence of an astonishingly real, made thing, a real artist. "Vinland" is a dream for which one must be awake.