Beyond the Moones Sphere: poems in eccentric orbits, by Ruth Berman, Crumb Fairy Press, 2809 Drew Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN 55416, September 2024, 36 pp, stapled chapbook.
Review by Sandra J. Lindow
Rhysling award winning writer and editor, Ruth Berman, routinely time travels. Readers of her most recent chapbook, Beyond the Moones Sphere, can find her wandering in time from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene through early 20th Century illustration to SF’s Golden Age and contemporary visions of the future. There is something both whimsically quaint and current about her approach, a writing voice and style that is uniquely hers.
The initial poem, “The Order of the Days” takes us even further back in time to ancient Babylonian and Norse astrologists who honored the planets with weekday names. The call and response rhythms of stanzas and chorus has a Shakespearian witchiness despite imagery descriptive of the weekday wage slave. It begins:
Moon rules
The first hour of Monday
Under the moon you head for work
Groggy from ending the weekend
Moonlight heavy on your heart
Moonstruck as you gather up your wits
And hope to face the week (4)
The chorus follows as a chant: “Three times through/ the seven
lanets/ Twenty-one hours/ Gone from a day/ Three hours over/ as the
ights clock in/ The fourth planet begins the next day” (4).
Paralleling the hours of the day, the chapbook features twenty-four poems. Many feature subjects dear to Berman’s growing up years: the bitter sweet “Al Hodge (Captain Video)” hero of the early TV series (1949-1955) and the problematic employment issues of “Werewolves in Space.” Her “Planet Clones” series references writers such as Bradbury, Bracket, and Burroughs. The whimsical “Cat Spacesuit” includes the lines “Don’t pish in the suit,” […] “It’s a stinker to clean” (15). “The Little Green Men Send an Ambassador to Earth” implies that these little aliens would find our green plants “gory” due to their defining physiology. Other poems postulate childhood and family life on planets unlike ours: “Shaping mudpies in the alien loam/ Of no colors that an Earthborn /Parent knows” (22) Three poems humorously reflect on the problem of interplanetary communication including the following dwarf poem:
Spacemail Correspondence
Letters take years
To Fax at lightspeed,
Originals centuries to deliver.
Write soon. (24)
The final poems reflect on life’s final destination. “Orpheus Gives Directions to the Orphics” valorizes the importance of memory. “Destination Funerals” advertises a way to make our funerals as much fun as our weddings and suggests “the Acropolis,/ The Cretan labyrinth, / The jungles that surround old Angkor Wat” (33) but settles on the actual astronomical excursions of Gene Roddenberry’s ashes via the “Voyager Memorial Spaceflight Service,” Astronomer Eugene Shoemaker’s burial on the moon, and finally the presence of “a bit” of astronomer Clyde Tombaugh’s ashes enroute on the “New Horizon’s ship to Pluto” the planet he discovered in 1930.
Berman’s Crumb Fairy press takes its name from a folktale where a beggarwoman who feeds hungry children on bread crumbs turns out to be the Queen of Sheba. Likewise, Berman’s poems tend to begin in the little struggles and pleasures of everyday life then take unexpected turns into the magical, mystical, and unexpected. Berman put this chapbook together as a celebration of Rosh Hashonah, the Jewish New Year. She is always worth reading, her work representing both a fannish love for the field and a scholar’s critical eye. This is a book to read and treasure. You can purchase it from her at the above address.
Sandra Lindow has served as Vice President and Acting President of SFPA. Her poetry has been seen in various markets including Asimov’s, Star*Line, Dreams and Nightmares, Dwarf Stars, and the Rhysling Anthologies. Her spec related editing includes Dwarf Stars, Eye to the Telescope, and most recently the Rhysling winners anthology, Alchemy of Stars II. She lives on a hilltop in Menomonie, Wisconsin where she waits out the pandemic and attempts various strategies to keep varmints from eating her vegetables and perennials.
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