How Our Roots Define Us: A Review of Dannie Ruth’s Inside the Orb of an Oracle
By Darah Schillinger
In her book, Inside the Orb of an Oracle (2020), Dannie Ruth transforms everyday images into art, bringing to life both grief and joy in the moments we may overlook. This collection of poetry illustrates how death and destruction belong alongside love and intimacy, combating the heavy reality of grief with the small, beautiful parts of life that may seem insignificant, like the grass on your toes drifting to the bottom of a pool. The poems manage to critique American values while also praising the cultures that have formed in spite of those values, recognizing that despite America’s deep systematic failures, it is the resilience of its people that we must celebrate.
The chapbook begins and ends with family, first describing the “equilibrium” of her own birth between her parents and sibling and seeing herself as “the end and the beginning of the whole.” The chapbook then ends with short, poetic descriptions of everyone significant in the poet’s own life, bookending the poems themselves with the immortalization of family. Ancestral ties and family are the dominating themes throughout the collection, as Ruth consistently refers back to her own roots and identity as a black woman in America.
We continue to discover more of our story, but most impeccable is this untethered bond that has bred four generations of black.
-I am a descendant of my great great grandfather’s third wife.
There is importance impressed upon her roots that cannot be ignored, revitalizing the idea of ancestry in a time when we’d rather forget the past than learn from it. Ruth’s emphasis on family and her roots seems to give meaning to the present, finding self within the stories and experiences passed down through generations. In “car ride lullaby,” the speaker describes a family reunion and the sights, sounds, and smells that defined her childhood:
The smell of grass charcoal, and old bay outback,
out front a street race
sunlight bouncing off dark backs
stretched arms and legs at the finish line
The smell of black and mild’s, beer, weed and wine, cigarettes and raspy conversations
These images are so routine yet illustrated so beautifully it’s as if we have transported there ourselves, watching everything happen in vibrant flashes of color and sound. The moments of joy and daydreams we are given perfectly contrast the grief and violence we see on other pages, giving a well-rounded, complex look into the speaker’s personal experiences.
The theme of ‘the linear’ defines Ruth’s poetry, imagining the white narrative as the default line of truth that excludes every other narrative it has erased. The linear is used to criticize America’s treatment of black voices and engage her readers in a conversation of colonialism, advertising the linear as a polished version of America's truth in need of critique. In “line leader,” the poem begins with:
His story is linear like the schools teach
And ends with:
He soothes:
No one else will breathe
our air. Fight against us
if you dare, you of darker
skin & coarser hair.
We are not told explicitly who the dominating “He” is but given the language of othering provided by the ending stanza it seems the “He” is actually a personified image of the white, male narrative of American colonialism. The “He” is a symbol of the oppressor, real but elusive, because of the sheer pervasion of whiteness within our society. As we know, there cannot be one dominating social group without the oppression of another, and with her poetry, Ruth puts into words the frustration, anger, and helplessness one feels when fighting a system that oppresses them.
Like the linear, death is central to Ruth’s storytelling, acting as a grounding force that sobers us and reminds us to savor the moments we may take for granted. In “only time we heard dad curse,” the speaker begins the poem with:
someone from the neighborhood shot a dog
& tossed this death over our fence
Here we are given a glimpse into the speaker’s own relationship with death, turning it into a tangible force that can be thrown away and thrust upon us. If we view death as someone forced, it revisits the old conversation about the unfortunate reality of unpredictable death, which Ruth also touches upon in her poems about gun violence and disease. From “guns”:
They reside at your local McDonald’s, Wal-Mart,
maybe even your grandmother’s purse.
dependable, destructive, damned,
damn near patriotic.
And from “my world”:
I had seen so many die
suddenly, slowly, miraculously
I began to understand the value
of a life and a life unfulfilled.
Death becomes visible in these poems, reminding us of our own mortality without instilling the same fear we’re accustomed to. Death becomes a handgun, the sterile white inside a hospital, the corpse of an animal. To Ruth, death is no longer something abstract and looming, but rather something sad and very real—something that can be tossed from one yard to another.
Not only is Dannie Ruth’s Inside the Orb of an Oracle a beautiful, free-verse glimpse into what makes a black, female poet in America but it is also a symphony of joy and color, death, and the whispers of slavery still manifesting around us, all compiled into one gorgeous chapbook. After experiencing it for myself, it is clear we must all read and reread until every smell is experienced, every image seen, and every poem is absorbed into the warmth of our chests.
Ruth, Dannie. Inside the Orb of an Oracle. C&R Press, 2020. https://crpress.org/shop/insidetheorbofanoracle
Darah Schillinger is a rising senior at St. Mary’s College of Maryland studying English Literature with a double minor in Creative Writing and Philosophy. She previously interned for the literary magazine EcoTheo Review in summer 2020 and has had poetry published in both her school literary journal, AVATAR, and in the Spillwords Press Haunted Holidays series for 2020. Darah currently lives in Perry Hall, Maryland with her parents, and in her free time she likes to write poetry and paint.
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