FROM the early interrogations, short-lined, sly, skeptical, a poet standing apart and looking and listening, Rodney’s world over two decades moves remorselessly towards participation in the world. The lyric spaces give way to the intense thingliness of The Book of Craving. There is much in this collection, wise perception, useful craft. She seems to tell us it is not enough to look, care, describe, even sing. There must be an entering: "Thousands of moths underfoot, where time itself must break."
—Robert Kelly

THE three parts of Moon on an Oarblade Rowing conjoin to form a triptych depicting incidents of historical violence only half visible through formative reflections: things from the quotidian, the "normal," the personal. Culminating with The Book of Craving, which is a beautiful work of narrative meditation, looking forward and back through the gaps that loss—and words—make and then fill with time and light, it seems that it is history that consists of unique, singular, inexplicable events, and individuality that is part of some continuum. The affirmation here is stunning.
—Lyn Hejinian

THIS stunning collection of poetry by Janet Rodney investigates the interstices of our collective unconscious and the idiosyncrasies that bind human to human in our most intimate, familial relationships. With tenderness and muscle, Rodney excavates "the physical and spiritual" realms of being by illuminating landscapes of love and war. A major achievement.
—Martine Bellen

Excerpts from Moon on an Oarblade Rowing

***

III.

1st Movement.

First I thank someone
for the guilt-making center of self

that place where
I swing anchor

below and before
the great affections, I

am the world’s business.

* * *

2nd Movement.

We could bind together
all the books
composed in different ages

in diversity of circumstance,
light and information,
the writer known
or forgotten
give no ground for difference:

The composer is one
and the same,
a plaything

of wax, You, a half inflated bladder in the temperature
of a particular ocean
which you should
press just once,
if you can,
between thumb and finger
and you will have
blessed a chosen vessel in
fallible man

whose imagination, like yours,
fills one revolving shadow

with love for another.