Betsy Mars responds to the pain and reality of life.
Reading poetry can produce a variety of moods. To cite only a few: Some collection prompt thoughtfulness. Others can make you thoughtful. Still others prompt you to go quiet. And I can read some of the poems by a poet like Billy Collins and smile, often laughing out loud.
As I read Rue Obscure, the first full collection by poet Betsy Mars, one word kept popping to mind. And the word was pensive. Take that is the word’s broadest possible sense – deeply thoughtful and often hinted at sadness or wistfulness.
This collection by Mars is about relationships, and pain, and loss. Loved ones die, sometimes painfully. Marriages can come to an end. Memories can evoke hurt. Sometimes we hurt ourselves and others. Friendships can be lost. Songs unearth buried memories. We fill our lives with things, not people. Our homes are sold to others. We discover the infirmities of age.
You find all of these in Rue Obscure, and more. Yet this isn’t a collection about the loss of hope; you discover it also includes an underlying resilience, a resilience that may not be obvious but is still there. I may have experienced these things, I may still be experiencing them, but I am still here, I am still standing.
Aurora Australis
You extended an olive branch –
I might have called them leaves –
your writing – capillaries,
a transparent filigree.
A red-tied bundle of letters,
bound like a deep vein thrombosis
waiting to strike. Light lines
on skin-blue paper –
some went up like kindling –
a fire lit to smoke out my demons;
the rest I kept in a shoebox of our artifacts,
a kind of love museum.
You engineered an expert knot,
a string as thick as blood
pooled in my heart,
thin as thermosphere
when you fell, apart.
Betsy Mars
The reality that struck me most about the poem is that last line: “when you fell, apart.” The poet, the one going through the same experience, is still standing and not fallen, apart.
Mars is a poet, writer, photographer, and editor. He poems have been published in numerous literary journals, anthologies, and magazines, including MacQueen’s Quinterly, Sheila-Na-Gig, Sky Island, Autumn Sky, and many others. She received a B.A. degree in psychology and an M.A. degree in communication management from the University of Southern California.
Yes, Rue Obscure is a “pensive’ collection. That’s exactly the right descriptive word. The poems navigate pain, loss, and heartbreak, and that is perhaps the point: the reality of life can be navigated.
Photo by Herve Simon, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
- Poets and Poems: Betsy Mars and “Rue Obscure” - October 22, 2026
- Poets and Poems: Kortney Garrison and “The Fixed Hours” - October 20, 2026
- Matthew Zapruder and “The Story of a Poem” - October 15, 2026
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