Here is a keen observer, charting day-to-day experience in poems of loss and quiet celebration. A series of elegies, The Strength of Materials reflects Rhea Tregebov’s understanding of the human passage through time. Her resilient poetics excavates the difficult terrain of the self in search of elusive strength.

Tregebov’s fifth collection of poetry is her finest, most elegant work. The poems reveal a compelling interest in the human body and its interaction with people and place, articulating a dissociation between body and mind as “a dangerous space…/in between the not and the knowing.” Although she admits that “I have only my own body,” she trusts neither corporeal nor spiritual memory. The body as a site of betrayal resonates throughout these poems where the speaker recalls herself as a child ill in hospital; the discovery of her adolescent body; her body once shared with a lover; her body birthing a child; and her middle-aged body “having its way.”

The body as a flawed, uncertain repository of human memory is linked to language as the flawed vehicle of poetry. In these reflective poems, Tregebov seeks “a language of the heart,” transparent and lucid as felt experience. Her efforts are thwarted by words themselves, variously “cold or bloodless in an educated mouth” or alive with “friction…salt and wet.”

The elegiac tone of the volume is one of its strengths. Although she meditates on ordinary moments and records the difficulty of daily living, Tregebov’s poems raise large questions – “What are we the containers of, what/do we hold?” – and move outward to the larger world where she sees apathy and violence on the streets. In the cold face of reality, Tregebov’s poems are enlightening and sustaining.