Luanne Castle’s third collection of poetry, Rooted and Winged, is a striking exhibition of poetic intuition and skill. Comprised of forty-four poems and structured in four parts, the poems take readers on a journey through contrasts, dilemmas, and disturbances, all witnessed or summoned by a narrator who offers unflinching observations of nature, scenes, and moods. In keeping with her first two collections, Doll God (Aldrich Press, 2015) and Kin Types (Finishing Line Press, 2017), Castle has woven family members and childhood memories into sometimes quiet, sometimes tumultuous present-day reflections.
Section I features imagery that elaborates on the predicament of being conscious of dualities, contradictions, and contrasts. The narrator in the opening poem, “Tuesday Afternoon at Magpie’s Grill,” as in many of the poems, notices the world both inside and outside, the “Dodger talk at the bar,” the shady sycamore tree outside, but “No matter what I notice / no matter what I record, I will never / capture the ease of wind-filled wings,” and there is the book’s theme as well as the narrator’s dilemma.
A tone of grief moves through most of the poems in their presentation of people, moments, and scenes. They reveal the difficulties that life can hold and the emotional disturbance that accompanies memories, without lapsing into sentimentality or brazen nostalgia. For example, in “A Year in Bed, with Window,” she never explains why she is confined to the bed for so long: Nothing beyond the “edges / of the bed matters to me”:

Not the wind sifting through
the aspen leaves way up
there or the lizard sunning,
a bicyclist’s hair streaming
on her way to the market.

The agony of decay, of gravity, of attachment and loss, of aging and caring for the aged, are all currents in Rooted and Winged. The world Castle has invoked is vibrant and intense, threatening and consoling, exquisite and dangerous. Nonetheless, despite the tormenting possibilities, and despite the fact that the “last star” can “darken / like an executioner’s hood,” as in the final poem, “After Darkness,” we might find “long after, a flicker from the pile. / We bring our efforts to the task.” Her poetic efforts, like the woman sitting at Magpie’s Grill in the opening poem, have given her and her readers, if only for a fleeting few moments, the ease of wind-filled wings.