The Talking Mirror: a review of The Silent Conversation, by Bruce Bond. Cloudbank Books. Corvallis, OR. 2025. $17.00 paper.
The voice in these poems reflects the face of a person with the sensitivity of a child and the wisdom of an ancient, the voice of someone very young and paradoxically very old. The book’s title is a paradox: a silent conversation. Bond’s conversation involves two: the speaker and another entity, cloaked in mystery. The speaker’s introspection opens a door for the reader’s. An appreciation of this book can be gotten by considering its moments of silence, its paradoxes, and its illuminations.
Silence, filled with moments of reflection of public and private events, is, like the book’s title, paradoxical, filled with memories that yield both pleasure and pain; it is “the ghost that walks the long / white halls of paradise or intensive care.” Silence, “a prayer to no one,” “with no one there to hear,” evokes a line from W. H. Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles:” “And could not hope for help and no help came.” In Bond’s sequential title poem, “The Silent Conversation” “silence / sharpens the edge of speech, words / the work no will can quite express.” The silence not only of words but also of a cry must be considered, the cry of the six million lost in The Holocaust, the genocide of European Jews in World War II. Auden’s line, preceded by “they were small,” also evokes the six million. Bond’s silence, as it sharpens and haunts, is filled with reflection. In “Auden” the reader arrives at the line “We will remember, says the door to a museum.” A conversation invokes two, or more. One section of the title poem begins:
The other voice in this exchange
is the space between us. So says
the space. The crackle of the river
in the background of the burial,
the feral stranger at the margin.
The other voice at night is breath
The word “remember” is perhaps synonymous with “reflect,” in the silence, the pauses in Bond’s conversation.
From this conversation participants take away nothing and everything. At the beginning of the book, in “Ax,” there is the thought conveyed in “it tells you nothing…” Farther along “The ax in the water will tell you.” Two contradictory statements in one poem? Perhaps not, when the reader considers the latter statement’s future tense. What is heard coexists with what is seen. In “Pierce,” what is heard coexists with “the lure of being seen as unseen.” The poem “Black Chalk” begins with a classroom memory and ends with “The home / that was no one’s. And so the home of all.” Divided into four sections, The Silent Conversation is threaded with paradox, statements seemingly contradictory that turn out to be otherwise. In “Roma” “a photograph says / what it cannot to remember what it can.” In “Shame,” “those who cannot sleep / never wake.” In “Snow Burial” bells “toll in silence.” From the book’s final poem, “Jacket,” “There are days / I turn to no one, and no one whispers, / remember me.” In the book’s second section, the poet conveys the public-private contradiction of the social media’s Facebook. “The Facebook Elegies” begins with a reference to the death of actor-comedian Robin Williams and Facebook users’ responses to its announcement. “We mourned …the touched friend / we did not know.” Further in:
Surely the hole in us was evidence earth had
moved, a share of us was elsewhere, and so
we paid our respects, laid blame, confessed
the loss we feel when a night wind carries us
to pastures more stoned with graves than any
common yard.
Among the poems there is the phrase “circle of light.” In The Silent Conversation illuminations flicker in the dark. They are revelations, moments of epiphany burning bright. In “Gallery of Inanimate Objects” the speaker asks “what did I know / of the face I held to the mirror of my mother, how space became / a feature, a form, an artifice between us.” The poem “Bridge” is nocturnal. “Suicide bridge, we called it.” Further along, “I was here, says / the concrete beam above.” The speaker reflects “The kid who jumped just keeps falling,” and concludes, “And I will love her.” These words from “Auden” conjure Auden’s elegy for Yeats and also Joyce’s story “The Dead.” “The words of the dead / lie down in the public park to give the snows / a place to fall.” From “Purge,” which begins with a reference to “Hitler’s painting / Madonna and Child” this passage burns itself onto the page:
Let me begin again. A child is born,
and as the manger cripples in the wind,
as the cow and donkey wander off
toward a dip of land on the horizon,
the cradle waxes luminous, raised
an inch above the excrement and hay.
In the middle of the title poem there are the words “I make therefore I am.” The Silent Conversation begins with the poet’s coming to terms with the loss of his mother. It ripples out into a coming to terms with losses both public and private. It asks a lot and gives a lot in return. The poet says “the other voice is …is breath. His book, a mirror clouded by breath, reflects gratitude for being alive enough to grieve, to celebrate, to speak, and to listen and heed. Every poem is on the mark, and warrants going back to, for the sheer pleasure of reading.