Uncertain Acrobats include poems written by Rebecca Hart Olander, which reflect a lot of feelings of grief of her father’s death. Readers can resonate with the feelings expressed in these poems. Even though everyone has different memories with their fathers, Olander’s poems can always trigger the same emotions that readers experienced about grief and love. Both “Supermoon” and “Veterans Day on Authors Ridge” use the form of couplet to deliver the feelings of emptiness. Reading the poems via the pace and rhythm of the couplets, readers feel the emotion changes designed by Olander.

In “Supermoon”, Olander describes her grief hallucination following the loss of her father through the phases of the moon. The poem starts with a beautiful night with the living room soaking by moonlight. “My brother walks toward me / on the deck of a summer party” shows it is a common weekend in the summer when the family has a party. While readers are immersed in the peaceful and daily night, “and-trick of evening light, / flick of what the heart wants–” disturbes the peace of the night. Even though Olander tries to blend such disruption to the tranquil night by using “and-” to connect the previous couplet with this stanza. The trick of light means what people are able to see is the effect of light and does not actually exist. Then there is “our father is there. / We look, but we don’t see.” Suddenly readers are drowned into the sadness that her father is no longer alive. And readers are able to feel her vulnerability following the hallucination after the death of her father. At that time, she and her brother believe that their father is still around them. But after that moment, the sad reality brings them emptiness and disappointment. The poem ends with saying that “our gone beloveds” and moons are similar in that sometimes they are close to us like the moon be at perigee, and sometimes they are far away from us like the moon be at apogee. More importantly, her father is the same as the moon to Olander, because her father is still there at some place around her eternally like the moon is forever rotating around the earth. This poem forces readers to read it with the rhythm of each couplet. The couplet also simulates the love between Olander and her father because of the two-line form, which is like the form of conversations between two people. The couplet also creates a lot of empty lines. On the one hand, it offers readers a time for a break between each stanza. Readers follow the pace that Olander designs that readers fall into a sudden depression from being in a memory of an ordinary place. On the other hand, empty lines reflect the feeling of emptiness of Olander of the loss of her father.

Another couplet in Uncertain Acrobats is “Veterans Day on Authors Ridge”, which is similar to “Supermoon” in that readers experience an abrupt emotion change while reading the couplet. Authors Ridge is a cemetery in Concord. Reading the poem, readers are taken into Authors Ridge on a sunny day of early winter. National flags are waving on top of mausoleums. Because the second line in each stanza starts with an indent, the eyes of readers follow each line while alternating between with or without indent. The gaze of readers moving windingly left and right starting at different positions of each line is just like Olander walks “along / the winding paths,” in Authors Ridge. The tranquility in the woods stays with readers until “brotherhood planes fly their noisy formations, / and the neighbor across the street”. Jealousy is a feeling that we desire something owned by others that we don’t have. Readers could feel the grief triggered by jealousy of watching someone else doing a common chore. “Rakes his leaves. I envy the task, / the way what he piles will compost // into something smaller, how he can sort / what has come undone”. Seeing the neighbor raking the leaves, Olander envies how leaves will compost to smaller parts, because it reminds her that she could not sort out her unsettled feelings of loss of her father. Unlike the leaves, the pain and sadness of loss could not compost into something smaller. Similar to “Supermoon”, the empty lines between each stanza make readers have a break while reading at a slower pace just like strolling in the woods. The empty space also reflects the emptiness of not owning sorted emotions after feeling jealousy of seeing the neighbor can sort his undone chores.