Good Grief, the Ground

“We were sad on the ground,” runs the refrain of Jean Valentine’s “I came to you.” Taking Valentine’s line as its epigraph, Margaret Ray’s Good Grief, the Ground is an on-the-ground report on our sadness and the various foundations of 21st-century American life—environmental, social, spiritual, political. The ground of Florida, Ray’s home state, is an urban ecosystem where dead alligators block busy intersections and “boys gape a little longer” than girls, “because in central Florida this / is how it’s done.” In “Garden State,” ground means the spongy earth of springtime New Jersey but also this-worldly existence, evoking a “postlapsarian good mood”—“early evening: the light just now is furtive, holy, / this is no prologue but the thing itself.”

If one of Ray’s aspirations is to distill sadness into clarified lines—“Pretend that I feel at home in this life”—another is to leave it momentarily behind, taking imaginative flight from the ground. Her poetry counterbalances grief with good grief, Charlie Brown’s tragicomic exclamation. Not that Charlie would play the profane “middle-school era game” Fuck, Marry, Bury. Especially not with the trio Ray chooses in her poem “Fuck, Marry, Bury: Speaker, Poem, Poet”: “Of course I am trying to bury myself […] but that same self // is trying so hard to merge // with me we might as well be fucking.” Where better to settle down than Ray’s handcrafted stanzas, her verbal rooms: “Come here, darling. Let’s live together // in this room we have built.”

With 52 poems and a dozen-odd modes, Good Grief, the Ground sprawls further than many first books, though Ray’s strongest work often lingers in place. Four poems concentrate on an odd duck named Wanda, whose mind might move straightaway from meat pizza to dwelling “deliciously / on her own incarnate-ness, en-meated, in the flesh.” Ray describes Wanda as both “an aspirational alter-ego” and “a 21st century patron saint of curiosity and wonder”; often spacey, always inquisitive, she could be any one of us:

Wanda isn’t taking any calls because she’s listening
with headphones to the murmur of it all—