The Mansion of Happiness

Robin Ekiss’s melancholy, evocative collection The Mansion of Happiness takes readers into a world of Victorian-era toys, illusions, and games. Like the novelist Elena Ferrante, Ekiss appears fascinated by dolls as inherently charged, frequently maternal objects. Within the poems in this collection, dolls are doppelgangers and surrogates, repositories for grief and longing. Dolls are also mechanical, and Ekiss employs the imagery of mechanization to stunning effect, as in these lines from “Conversation with Doll”:

Don’t feel bad: grief is also mechanical,
winding around everything we know.

I’m like that too—speaking only to myself
in the company of others. As they say:

wear the same dress every day,
rehearse your own forgiveness.

These are poems to read slowly, savoring their musicality and the intricate nesting of their images, an effect not unlike the layering of Matryoshka dolls. The Mansion of Happiness was Ekiss’s debut collection, published in 2009. Hopefully, readers won’t have to wait too many more years before gaining access to a second collection.