Public Works

PUBLIC WORKS is poet Ronna Bloom's third collection of poetry. In it, several themes emerge:1. The private experience of the public (the idea that everything we experience -- a book, a speech, a hospital, a religion, water running into the taps -- we experience privately);2. The public role of the poet (as in Ginsberg's lines: "While I'm here, I'll do the work/and what's the work?/To ease the pain of living"); and3. The placement of the individual in a wider context (the places we findourselves inhabiting: a body, a house, a job, a memory, as in the common phrase on maps in shopping malls: "You Are Here.") -- Some poems address overlapping themes: physical location in a body, astreet, a city; and recognition of one's own response to the institutions or services found there. Bloom is interested in the way individuals move back and forth between and within the public/private landscape. These poems, moving through personal, physical and social realms, chart the uneven, uncertain trajectory of a life.