Ronna Bloom, a Toronto writer, psychotherapist, teacher, and erstwhile photographer, collects images and stories from her many lives for her second collection of poetry, Personal Effects. The “personal effects” of Bloom’s poetry are not so much personal belongings as longings.

Given Bloom’s career as a psychotherapist, it is not surprising that many of her poems are about healing, often against a backdrop of betrayal, abuse, and fear. Beginning with the epigraph from Desmond Tutu, and the poem that follows it, Bloom’s book turns and returns to the theme of healing: “This man knows something/about healing … everything must be/heard, everything must be/held, in the same room.”

Some of the more interesting poems, however, are those that move away from the language of psychology and into the realm of photography. In these pieces, Bloom wrestles with the paradox of photographic reality, which is always subject to, and the subject of, the angle of the lens and the length of the exposure. Writing with the stark visual imagery of black and white photos, Bloom is able to render rich, even sensual effects, in varying shades of grey.

Still, one wishes that there were a little more space for imaginary colours here. In her meticulous attention to the details of image and narrative, Bloom’s poems seem compelled by the need to find the right – in her case the accurate – way to describe reality. As she writes in the title poem, “There is the difficulty of being faithful/to the object, the fear of betraying it.”

Every detail of these poems is carefully posed and faithfully described, even the silences and empty spaces. But it is, ironically, in the poems where she stops struggling to tell her stories faithfully, where she leaves room for more “loose talk easy licking,” that Bloom generates her most powerful after-effects.