Blood/Not Blood Then the Gates: Poems. Ron Riekki. Johnston, IA: Middle West Press, 2022.

Ron Riekki’s short collection of poems Blood/Not Blood Then the Gates is a pitiless, unsentimental, and piercing insight into the legacy of extreme violence on a human being. At times it echoes Cormac McCarthy’s hematic prose in Blood Meridian. It can be both sparse and haunting in its descriptiveness. In “Looking in the Mirror During Desert Storm,” Riekki writes:

…in our room is my bunkmate,
a bulimic whose sleep is as

brutal as God. I watch him
watch nothing and then stare…[1]

I’m reminded of McCarthy’s Kid, who spends a night in a hermit’s hut on a wild trail at the commencement of his journey: “He [the Kid] woke sometime in the night with the hut in almost total darkness and the hermit bent over him and all but in his bed.”[2]

At other times Riekki echoes the restrained imagist style of poet Wallace Stevens. For example, in “The Helicopter on Fire When I Was in the Military,” Riekki writes, “We looked through binoculars and watched the bodies melt.”[3] Stevens writes in a prose statement on the poetry of war, “In the presence of the violence of war, consciousness takes the place of the imagination.”[4] Reading Riekki we are enjoined to that type of immediacy, which is why the writing is so affecting.  

He provides a nightmarish depiction of PTSD and its relentless toll. In “When I was in A-School in the Navy,'' he writes

…A Marine told me his PTSD

is like Jesus in the desert, Satan approaching,
and that time with Satan
goes on forever.[5]

His work is emotionally honest and arresting, and moments of impact seem to emerge with little warning. Riekki’s style meanders from brief, punctuated, haiku-like imagery—as in the title “In the military, they made me go around the building, killing birds”—to prose-poetry that alludes to a sense of slipping, or losing one’s mental footing, in whatever comfortable tableau might be in the reader’s attendance. For an example of that sense of slipping, from the poem titled “They say that,” we read:

In elementary school,
I remember walking home
and seeing three boys
killing a cat
with sticks,
like it was some pagan ritual
where the sons of miners—

with their fathers caked down
into the earth,
absent and angry—
were trying to beat the innocent
so deep into the ground
that God would emerge
and choke out
all the poverty
of existing
to quiet them.
I kept walking;
like God,
did nothing.[6]

The greatest strength of this short volume resides in what it resists. Brevity comes without any attempt at cleverness, irony, or cynicism. “Eventually, everyone is going to have to work as a carnie.” The politics of veterans’ affairs is never far from the surface, but bitterness has succumbed to melancholy. PTSD counselors—the good ones—seem valued by veterans commensurate with their scarcity. From “22,” for example:

The counselor has never been in the military.
Maybe not necessary.
But maybe it is.
I don’t know.
My counselor tells me she’s thinking of quitting.
And then we start the session.[7]

Patriotism and brotherhood make virtually no appearance. War is neither glorified, theorised, nor made abstract. Self-pity is as absent as anger. In “In the military, they made us paint the bottom of the stairs,” the final lines read, “It feels wonderful when a war begins, they tell us. Then a war begins.”[8]

The volume left me with the strong impression that redemption is neither sought nor expected. What is needed is relief. If this work can transcend the subjects of war, violence, and trauma, it is because relief from the human condition is the quintessential human need. Nobody should think this work is just for veterans, or for those interested in war and violence. From two poems near the end of the volume we begin to sense a lightness:

…and I drove to

the sand where the goodness is so
obvious…[9[

and

there are times when you feel good enough to grace God with belief.[10]

The absence of God may be this volume’s most significant presence. Its most important absence, though, is humanism. When humans assert themselves, regardless of God’s absence and without any notion of human redemption, affirming mere life as Ron Riekki does, we are witnessing grace.

Dr. Zac Rogers is a writer and researcher based at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. Currently working on a defence-funded research project examining the use of advanced data-driven decision-making tools by the military.

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Header Image: Untitled, Essaouira, Morocco 2021 (Samos Box).

Notes:

[1] Ron Riekki, “Looking in the Mirror During Desert Storm,” in Blood/Not Blood Then the Gates: Poems (Johnston, IA: Middle West Press, 2022), 17.

[2] Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, Or, The Evening Redness in the West (Vintage Books, 1992), 21.

[3] Ron Riekki, “The Helicopter on Fire When I Was in the Military,” in Blood/Not Blood Then the Gates: Poems (Johnston, IA: Middle West Press, 2022), 66.

[4] Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011), 206.

[5] Ron Riekki, “When I was in A-School in the Navy,” in Blood/Not Blood Then the Gates: Poems (Johnston, IA: Middle West Press, 2022), 26.

[6] Ron Riekki, “They say that,” in Blood/Not Blood Then the Gates: Poems (Johnston, IA: Middle West Press, 2022), 34.

[7] Ron Riekki, “22,” in Blood/Not Blood Then the Gates: Poems (Johnston, IA: Middle West Press, 2022), 49.

[8] Ron Riekki, “In the military, they made us paint the bottom of the stairs,” in Blood/Not Blood Then the Gates: Poems (Johnston, IA: Middle West Press, 2022), 40.

[9] Ron Riekki, “My PTSD counselor told me to",” in Blood/Not Blood Then the Gates: Poems (Johnston, IA: Middle West Press, 2022), 76.

[10] Ron Riekki, “The Seconds When I Left / The Counseling Office and Felt the PTSD / Might Be Leaving This Time Forever,” in Blood/Not Blood Then the Gates: Poems (Johnston, IA: Middle West Press, 2022), 78.