In this exceptional new collection, acclaimed poet Mary Kinzie opens her attention to the landscapes of the earth. Her poems of richly varied line lengths develop phrases at the syncopated pace of the observing mind: “Slag and synthesis and traveling fire / so many ways the groundwaves of distortion / pulse / through bedrock traffic and the carbon chain” she writes in the opening poem, “The Water-brooks.” Here, and throughout, her reflection on the natural world embraces the damages of time to which we can bear only partial witness but to which the human memory is bound.
In the collection’s title poem, Kinzie goes on to explore her own romantic griefs alongside the adventures of T. S. Eliot, “inadvertently working on a suntan” as he tours the desert in the roadster of his American girlfriend, whose heart he will break. Kinzie’s conviction that sorrow, too, is a form of passion allows her to lift poems from shattered thoughts and long-ago losses, at times blending prose and verse in a combustible mixture.
Determined not to prettify but still expressing fresh wonder at the beauty we stumble across in spite of our shortcomings, Kinzie delivers her bravest work yet in these new poems.
O God invisible as air
My tears have been my meat
sweet because no noxious thing runs with themonly fragrant naïveté of the reflective midday when bank herb and wood flower and water from the pool can best be gathered also the knowledge that these gifts are tenuous and that the mouth and the harp might soon be strange to play
ScattersiteRose of paperlattice of leafbranchwoodsy coated with sunfennel ashwheelrut deepeningmud turnsequinone quickroadway eddysecond growthlost thingslost growthsecond thingseddy sequin slide groundBright giftsilk wit liningoil of orangebicolor withthe sleeveWaft hoard liftlifewingrise intaketongueless lightuncover skyFirst PassionRunning there I am at fourteen I have been scoldedby my father for something I hadn't doneor hadn't not done who knows the dishes nothing serious like my smoking or ineptness with people and bad choices It was unjustand the almost irrelevant injustice grew so pure and tiny in its atmosphere of truth which rose like skythat I fell in love with it and it cut into me loosening the first tears (though these were not what frightened me at nightThen the griefs came loose beginning to run I was fourteen and wailed around the blocks more times than once my chest straining against the sobs in their delightful echoing back from the streets that suddenl were empty everyone having inched backward from the windows into the parts of rooms that are never chosen the side of the stairs the door to the water heater where they watched me amazed at this sourceless melodious grief eager to return to the normal dithering watchful golden gossip of the afternoonA ParakeetThere was my father's short sister rushing down the streetwith white light flying out her fingerendsfrom a kitchen towel with which she must have soughtto lure or drive or flutter space down upon(to calm ita chartreuse parakeetupright in grasshopper green againstthe thick tip of a tall poplar bare of leavesOne of the children ran after with the birdcageNothing tragic closes the anecdoteIt never became an anecdoteWhen I beganto tell itask it to the cousinsdid she scold down the parakeetthe grownups at the edges of the hour all seemedto turn their backsfrom the room with the noontime hellish kids' TV showand her children Joanand John Paul and Stephen and Bobbie Annwent blank and jumpyas they ate their pb and j and drank their milkas if I hadn't spokenor were no longer thereas if they had never had a parakeetas if the creaturenear the TV were newor never missing or wouldonly flee the house in somefar future after they'dmoved awaywhile I could notnot see it in all the time that would passthentill nowhereas it stood up like a woodpecker against the barkgreen as the green of sun on murky wateras she made her distant warble to the world(though she was more used to saying itto herselfThe aunt is deadand the youngestfemale cousin with the bones of a birdThey haven't spokenbut they know
“Mary Kinzie's new book reflects on itself and on poetry in a spirit that it engaging, expansive, venturesome, sometimes comic or surreal. . . Kinzie's achievement is to make the reflective into something lyrical, as well.” —Robert Pinsky, The Washington Post
Mary Kinzie is the author of six previous collections of poetry. Her earlier volumes include Drift, Autumn Eros, and Summers of Vietnam. She is the literary executor of American poet Louise Bogan and the author of A Poet’s Guide to Poetry.
View titles by Mary Kinzie
In this exceptional new collection, acclaimed poet Mary Kinzie opens her attention to the landscapes of the earth. Her poems of richly varied line lengths develop phrases at the syncopated pace of the observing mind: “Slag and synthesis and traveling fire / so many ways the groundwaves of distortion / pulse / through bedrock traffic and the carbon chain” she writes in the opening poem, “The Water-brooks.” Here, and throughout, her reflection on the natural world embraces the damages of time to which we can bear only partial witness but to which the human memory is bound.
In the collection’s title poem, Kinzie goes on to explore her own romantic griefs alongside the adventures of T. S. Eliot, “inadvertently working on a suntan” as he tours the desert in the roadster of his American girlfriend, whose heart he will break. Kinzie’s conviction that sorrow, too, is a form of passion allows her to lift poems from shattered thoughts and long-ago losses, at times blending prose and verse in a combustible mixture.
Determined not to prettify but still expressing fresh wonder at the beauty we stumble across in spite of our shortcomings, Kinzie delivers her bravest work yet in these new poems.
O God invisible as air
My tears have been my meat
sweet because no noxious thing runs with themonly fragrant naïveté of the reflective midday when bank herb and wood flower and water from the pool can best be gathered also the knowledge that these gifts are tenuous and that the mouth and the harp might soon be strange to play
Excerpt
ScattersiteRose of paperlattice of leafbranchwoodsy coated with sunfennel ashwheelrut deepeningmud turnsequinone quickroadway eddysecond growthlost thingslost growthsecond thingseddy sequin slide groundBright giftsilk wit liningoil of orangebicolor withthe sleeveWaft hoard liftlifewingrise intaketongueless lightuncover skyFirst PassionRunning there I am at fourteen I have been scoldedby my father for something I hadn't doneor hadn't not done who knows the dishes nothing serious like my smoking or ineptness with people and bad choices It was unjustand the almost irrelevant injustice grew so pure and tiny in its atmosphere of truth which rose like skythat I fell in love with it and it cut into me loosening the first tears (though these were not what frightened me at nightThen the griefs came loose beginning to run I was fourteen and wailed around the blocks more times than once my chest straining against the sobs in their delightful echoing back from the streets that suddenl were empty everyone having inched backward from the windows into the parts of rooms that are never chosen the side of the stairs the door to the water heater where they watched me amazed at this sourceless melodious grief eager to return to the normal dithering watchful golden gossip of the afternoonA ParakeetThere was my father's short sister rushing down the streetwith white light flying out her fingerendsfrom a kitchen towel with which she must have soughtto lure or drive or flutter space down upon(to calm ita chartreuse parakeetupright in grasshopper green againstthe thick tip of a tall poplar bare of leavesOne of the children ran after with the birdcageNothing tragic closes the anecdoteIt never became an anecdoteWhen I beganto tell itask it to the cousinsdid she scold down the parakeetthe grownups at the edges of the hour all seemedto turn their backsfrom the room with the noontime hellish kids' TV showand her children Joanand John Paul and Stephen and Bobbie Annwent blank and jumpyas they ate their pb and j and drank their milkas if I hadn't spokenor were no longer thereas if they had never had a parakeetas if the creaturenear the TV were newor never missing or wouldonly flee the house in somefar future after they'dmoved awaywhile I could notnot see it in all the time that would passthentill nowhereas it stood up like a woodpecker against the barkgreen as the green of sun on murky wateras she made her distant warble to the world(though she was more used to saying itto herselfThe aunt is deadand the youngestfemale cousin with the bones of a birdThey haven't spokenbut they know
“Mary Kinzie's new book reflects on itself and on poetry in a spirit that it engaging, expansive, venturesome, sometimes comic or surreal. . . Kinzie's achievement is to make the reflective into something lyrical, as well.” —Robert Pinsky, The Washington Post
Mary Kinzie is the author of six previous collections of poetry. Her earlier volumes include Drift, Autumn Eros, and Summers of Vietnam. She is the literary executor of American poet Louise Bogan and the author of A Poet’s Guide to Poetry.
View titles by Mary Kinzie
