In the current issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review Claire Keyes reviews Grace, Fallen From, the latest collection of poems by Marianne Boruch, as can be seen in the following excerpt and accompanying link to the complete review. Keyes reminds readers of ways they may find Boruch’s poetry appealing: “While Marianne Boruch’s poetry is most often grounded in the real world of observable fact, she gives us the poetry of the mind in the process of coming to its understandings. In this respect, her poems join in the modernist poetic of poets such as Jorie Graham and C. K. Williams.”Claire Keyes, Professor Emerita at Salem State College, is the author of The Aesthetics of Power: The Poetry of Adrienne Rich. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Calyx, Georgia Review, Orbis, Rattle, and The Women’s Review of Books, among others. Her chapbook, Rising and Falling, won the Foothills Poetry Competition. A new book of poems, The Question of Rapture, will appear in fall 2008 from Mayapple Press.
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Grace, Fallen From, Marianne Boruch. Wesleyan University Press, 2008. ISBN: 0819568635 $22.95
The title phrase of Marianne Boruch’s sixth book of poems comes from a line in “Snowfall in G Minor,” a poem more than halfway through the volume:
snowfall—as in
grace, fallen from,
as in a great height, released
from its promise.
The image of the snow as being “released from its promise” suggests an emergence into reality, of no longer being simply the “promise” of snow, but the actuality. “Grace, fallen from” also suggests a world of the unredeemed—a relief for the poet because it allows her to create her own world through the power of her thought, her words, her imagination.
In the Blue Pharmacy (2005), her collection of essays about poetry, contains a statement about Elizabeth Bishop that might serve as a guide to understanding the nature of Grace, Fallen From. She praises Bishop for showing us “the whole moving direction of the mind.” While Marianne Boruch’s poetry is most often grounded in the real world of observable fact, she gives us the poetry of the mind in the process of coming to its understandings. In this respect, her poems join in the modernist poetic of poets such as Jorie Graham and C. K. Williams.
Boruch’s approach is low-key. She speaks with a quiet intimacy and openness of the ordinary events of life: waiting for an elevator, writing words on paper, overhearing someone on a cell phone. In a poem titled “Lunch” she considers a visit to the zoo, its animals, its visitors all “very matter of fact” until it’s time for lunch:
the animals
look up. Something is about to happen. Food
does that. In this saddest of worlds, think
lunch and an ocean of hope
rides over us. Is it hope? And too cheap? This
metaphor filling the moment? the mind?
the life finally and exactly?
The kind of world Grace, Fallen From inhabits is, of course, “this saddest of worlds.” The poet invites us to think about lunch as an event providing “an ocean of hope.” Questioning her thoughts about the ordinary becomes Boruch’s strategy throughout this volume.
Even when she takes on a subject as profound as “What God Knew,” in a poem of that title, her approach is tentative and questioning: “When God / knew nothing it was better, wasn’t it? / Not the color blue yet, its deep / unto black. No color at all really . . ..” And this is what she gives us in many poems—the creative sense of un-knowing . . ..
[Visitors are invited to read the rest of the review, as well as other works, in the new Fall/Winter 2008-2009 issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review.]
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