Many poems of love loss have been written, but none are as difficult to categorize as those in Rebecca Lindenberg’s collection Love, an Index (McSweeney’s; 96 pages). The title itself is a teasing, post-romantic gesture, as though the subject can be summed up in one sequential arrangement. And yet, the poet attempts. But unlike Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” whose world is full of “many things… filled with the intent / to be lost that their loss is no disaster,” Lindenberg’s poems do not possess that self-consoling bravado. Her loss is abrupt and unforeseeable; her lover-poet, Craig Arnold, mysteriously vanishes while hiking a volcano in Japan.
Whereas Bishop is soberly enterprising in her compilation of losses, Lindenberg is prudent. Her poems cautiously interact with memory: “I do not believe I remember any of this wrong, but there is reason I have left bits out.” One might say she is a curator and a synthesizer of experience, a specialist rather than a generalist, for she chooses particular scenes, times, places, and poets who give voice to her emotions. Lindenberg effortlessly creates an egoless world, full of feeling yet devoid of melodrama, in which she plays sidekick to the more famous Arnold.
