A Rose Is a Rose Is a Rosarium: Hannah Dow and a Perfect Starter Book of Poetry

By Manny Melendez

How does one sit to write a review of poems? Are they not secrets kept by the poet, to be shared only with each reader, the secrets shifting just as the form and the words do, page to page? Hannah Dow’s Rosarium, a spry yet fleeting collection of poetry, seems designed to answer this very question.

Dow’s poems tell varied tales, but they share common stems and petals, much like roses themselves, growing within identical soil. She begins this collection with a series of poems on nesting and finding one’s home, whether inside one’s body (“What Is the Body?”), on the seas (“Halcyon: An Origin Story”), or even beyond an idea like motherhood (“Postcard from the Dead Sea”), drawing power from elegant verses that sing lulling siren-songs to the readers. These sparse but potent lines also scour for crystal truths, evident even if the reader squints at the lines, purposefully looking for lies or aversions. In “Anyone Would Drown”, Dow imbues the poem with muted but striking images such as, “Not when a tidal wave lapped the shores of its trees and its houses, depositing fish skeletons in retreat,” to capture the purity striped in each new image being projected on the page.

This quality in Dow’s work is perhaps most evident in the “Postcard from…” series in this collection: thirteen poems that act as letters or notes to oneself, from reminders of how to quiet volcanic grief (“Postcards from Gethesmane”) to how a name written down can explode an entire army of seedlings to the ground that are already bursting to grow (“Postcard from Caye Caulker, Belize”) or even to the limbo of borders, physical or otherwise, that surround us (“Postcard from Kansas City, Kansas”). Aside from the breadth of kilometers traversed in these postcards, it is the memento mori between each stanza of each of these thirteen poems that floods the reader with vibrancy and honest feeling, like sifting through long-forgotten memories or finding candor in the company of dearest friends. They are a kind reminder that one must indeed live—what a terrific place for one’s poetic journey to begin.

Still, Dow is not content with this theme, as she proves in the array of content in her other poems in this collection: the ever-present existence of nature and its continuous relationship with the body (“Genealogy”, “Why I Will Never Garden”, “In the Garden of Earthly Delights”), the minutiae and the banality of life even when encountering the complexities of love (“Infinitely Yours”, “Not My Day”, “Advice from a Marriage Counselor”), and, of course, the immense absurdities of humans experiencing anything, anything at all, told almost as parables (“The Harp Knows How to Be Stripped Bare”, “Origin of Salt”, “Poem with Inexact Apocalypse”).

The lessons and the stories Dow recounts in these poems are not new. This familiarity is its own breath of freshness, and the lightness of her writing, its humility, casts a warm and inviting trance across the page. Should Dow have reached further into her guts, or the sea’s ageless tombs, or even the other deaths and the decay that haunt several of these works? Perhaps. But this collection is a start, and a fitting one for all new to the genre one deigns to label Poetry—a brilliantly simple wreath adorned by truthful, at times achingly gorgeous, and always lucid words. Most fittingly is that Dow sees fit to ask her own question in the final poem, “Self-Portrait with Dragonfly,” that resonates, indeed, reverbs throughout this entire book, giving the reader one final glimpse of how one could, in time, understand poetry itself—

“I am doubled now

Beside myself

when you take me

by the back of the head,

bend me into a shape

we find suitable.

See how much our body is

like a circle.

Does this pose make us look eternal?”

It will be up to the reader to discover their answer, but as a beginner’s find, Hannah Dow’s Rosarium is an ideal place to sit with poetry. Indeed, in this garden, there is a rose for every heart, for every mind, for every secret one must keep sharing.

So keep sharing.

Let the pose sing of infinity.