Which is one way to read the Legend implicit to Mary Szybist’s Incarnadine. What do you know about Mary? Like Mary, Mary. The Bible Mary. What can anyone know about Mary? Did you know she she was overpowered by the Most High? What’s the Most High? How did intercourse with the Most High feel for Mary? What do you think Legend meant to Mary after she’d experienced the Most High? I’ve read Mary Szybist’s book Incarnadine, and one of the things I want to do is ask questions about Mary. Is it a coincidence that Mary wrote a book about Mary? Does the author, Mary, have a child? No. Is that relevant? Yes. But relevant only if you have a hard time seeing anyone featured in a Biblical story as being a real human being. Mary was real, and Mary is real. She wrote a book.

She’s written two books, actually. And they both find the persona of Mary to be an important literary device. Granted, Szybist’s first book, is more subtle. Many poems, like “What If I Could Look at You” or “What the World Is For” describe desire as felt by a contemporary speaker. But then other poems reference Mary Magdalene (as someone who was an intimate of Christ) or Mary, Christ’s mother (who would be pregnant by a Most High who was always so distant) as desiring figures. The poem “Long After the Donkey and Desert” speaks to the complicated tenderness Mary must feel for a lover who could be present (in that complicated way God would be present to Mary in particular) and not present. “Everyone has angels, but who has an angel’s child? / Woman with raven hair, you said, woman with fruit. / I was eating a pear when you came, so it sat, / half-eaten, for hours, lopsided, dry.” A poem like this alluding to Mary’s physical experience of the Annunciation as loving and possibly rapturous, when mixed with the more personal poems from a poet named Mary, is the core coincidence that informs the nature of desire as it is appears throughout Granted as something both holy and human.

How shocking, then, to find in Incarnadine a poem titled “Annunciation in Nabokov and Starr,” where the Nabokov is Lolita’s Nabokov and Starr is Kenneth Starr of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. The poem opens, “I simply can’t tell you how gentle, how touching she was. / I knocked, and she opened the door. / She was holding her hem in her hands.” Here, Szybist tells of an Annunciation that is crude and real. The same Annunciation, which, as told through her poem “Annunciation (from the grass beneath them),” may have happened on a lawn, where the grass was touched by God. It is as if Mary knows Mary’s life. She has a privileged view of it. She’s named Mary. And perhaps in the most ridiculous and at the same time resonant gesture, Mary Szybist indicates she could use some perspective on her life by considering how that Bible Mary she seems so familiar with is full of her own confusions.

The result is a 21st Century religious poem that is both personal and faithful. And full of confusions. Carl Phillips, in his essay, “No Rapture: The Psalms and Restiveness,” describes the speaker of the Psalms as a man full of confusions. His God was an absolute God set in His ways. But the speaker of the Psalms still beseeched and praised and jubilated about all he knew regarding God. As though his poems might change God’s mind. But one working definition of faith could center on a comforting acceptance of paradox. Mary Szybist speaks with such yearning for Mary’s divine conception. But she is also Mary, a 39-year-old woman “…who has become one of those childless women who reads too much about the death of children” (from “To Gabriela at the Donkey Sanctuary”). The job of a 21st Century poet, like Carl Phillips, like Mary Szybist is to make illogical logics like faith natural, not just divine. Do you remember that Mary, pregnant with Christ, was still a virgin? This is not logical. And, of course, it is common for religion to make illogical logical. And so Szybist artfully reconciles the legend of the Annunciation with our contemporary culture. Sometimes with humor, as in “Some Updates about Mary”: “It is not uncommon to find Mary falling asleep on her yoga mat when she has barely begun to stretch.” Sometimes with painful reality, as with “Notes on a 39-Year-Old Body,” that starts with a quote about the color and physical appearance of women’s ovaries, and then becomes an erasure poem. Incarnadine is sophisticated, wry, faithful, divine, contradictory, tragic and allusive. Deeply allusive. Which is the nature of faith, the Human History of faith.

Related Posts:

• Murder Ballad by Jane Springer
• “The Lamp With Wings” by M. A. Vizsolyi
• Rise in the Fall by Ana Božičević
• Desolation: Souvenir by Paul Hoover
• Forty-One Jane Doe’s by Carrie Olivia Adams

Murder Ballad is about a crime. It is about The South. But not that ironically distanced South that comes up in a certain brand of Southern Literature. Jane Springer is not your David Bottoms’ South. Or, put more appropriately, Jane Springer is inside the South David Bottoms is holding at arm’s length. Need I remind you that the sublime can be found in the terrible? And that there is a tradition accounting for how unreasonable the sublime is? Murder Ballad is a crime so deeply wrought in the book’s flesh that I would prefer, as a reader, to make that flesh a river. But Springer won’t let that happen. Read “Hindsight’s Ballad…” Where to say the crime were “inevitable” would be cheating the poem of its full scope of bewilderment. Inevitability implies the event will be coming into view at any moment. But for Springer, the crime is a horrible rape, and it’s in full view, at all times, from all angles. It’s in the unexceptional negligence a 16‐year‐old girl has for what she can make of her future. It’s in the mind of a stone marker commemorating a slave who died on plantation. It’s in every piece of inventory at the Dixie Dandy Grocery. It’s in the despicable laughter of six men, one of whom had a rodeo belt buckle.

What is truth in the South? Why does it feel like the most proper and honest way to look at trauma is to let it lie with everything else the South produces, arranged so the trauma thinks it’s getting a pass on real trauma, not because real trauma doesn’t exist, but because real trauma is so common in Tennessee and Louisiana. Tragedy in the South is endemic and innate to what the Southerner believes in herself. It is a thickening. Why make anything of it? It’s part of what people there live through. Death, or tragedy, or horrible crime feels like the color green. And in the real South, where don’t you see the color green?

For me, Murder Ballad feels like an apology. This horrible, ironic apology the speaker is writing to these Southern roots that ruined her adolescence. Yes, the South is broken. It is used up. It is every broken relationship her family ever fit into the DNA of these poems. Why is it the speaker who needs to apologize? You must not be from the South. Because, from what I can see that’s what they call love down there. That dark, immovable, unmistakably swollen river that is love loving you thicker and thicker. Et tu, Existence? the Southern writer proclaims. Who else would this speaker be writing her “Letter to the Dark” to? On every “tendril of incense allemanding through the first ambrosial jasmine” on every “hair of space parting to make way for the barge,” Springer has lodged a letter onto the fine grain of existence so she can articulate her love to its most minute substance.

Have you read Springer’s first book, Dear Blackbird? I have. And let’s just say mythology is personal. And whether this is a Southern thing or not, I’m not concerned. The landscape, the family, the incidental characters that enter both books have this fantastically grounded reality where you doubt and believe their existences at the same time. I give you the poem “Ether,” “a flammable mix of ethyl alcohol & sulfuric acid.” Also the name of the speaker’s grandfather. Also the man who would wait for a caged squirrel to bite his hand so he could break its back. Also the man who would carry a full wash tub of water to the second floor to save his infant son from fire. How’s that for a family patriarch?

I have seen deep‐throated Southern poetry like this before. Carolina Ghost Wood by Judy Jordan stands as one of my favorites. Filled with a similar population and landscape. For me, Springer’s book is one step higher. Like if you were using semiotics to analyze a Wes Anderson film, but the critic keeps filling his notebook with dried moths taped to each page as a method of signifying the unsignifiable Anderson has in each of his movies. That’s the texture of the South in Springer’s book. But I would say there’s a difference between the two books. Jordan gestures at the South, as though to say, Lo, South, you have reaped the death of my Mother, as you have reaped your own land. For my ear, Springer is more an inhabitant. For Springer, the South is a chorus that she is a part of, that she will forever sing with and through, even as she suffers such a horrific crime at its hands. There is nothing that could take the South out of her. She is the dead grandfather, the ghosts who merely crave cocaine but don’t need it, the bride who has drowned in a lake holding the pictures of everything she could have wished to see come true.

Related Posts:

• Incarnadine by Mary Szybist
• “The Lamp With Wings” by M. A. Vizsolyi
• Rise in the Fall by Ana Božičević
• Desolation: Souvenir by Paul Hoover
• Forty-One Jane Doe’s by Carrie Olivia Adams

Maybe that’s why the sonnet was invented–because people decided they would make an opposing mathematics to love. They would present love like it was an argument, or a paradox, or an exclamation, or some combination of these. If love is confusing, the sonnet would turn around and say ‘confusion is orderly.” Which makes the sonnet sound like Mr. Belvedere. It’s not, really, though it wouldn’t hurt to have a touch of Mr. Belvedere’s vinegar accent while you’re reading a good sonnet.

If you’re reading M. A. Vizsolyi’s love sonnets, I might suggest putting on a bowler hat (admittedly, Mr. Belvedere never wore a bowler hat), if only to give you a touch of René Magritte. Because for Vizsolyi, all the confusion and dysfunction of love is just so natural. And if the sonnet tradition commemorates the chase after love, Vizsolyi tilts the whole scene 45 degrees, and writes sonnets that are in the pursuit of a language for love. For “[love] misuses metaphors / & is tied together only loosely / by bleak words” or “there is a logic to love i told / her if 2=5.” Ah love, so elusive, even to a poet. Perhaps this is why Vizsolyi scrambles his syntax, to catch love off guard. His surreal anacoluthons follow one another so closely, so insistently, each poem is a tumbling game where syntax and language easily fall into various complementary meanings.

It might be why The Lamp with Wings, separated into four different sections, touches on four different times in the life of love. From love’s uncertain but inexplicably resolute beginnings in part I to love’s comfortable sustenance in part IV, Vizsolyi is into this love thing. He is in ardent pursuit. Might he catch it in the language of jubilant surrealism, for the beginning of love, when “smiling joy / recurs between the legs of lovers”? Or might Vizsolyi resort to the more dejected, Max Beckmann-ish surrealism, when love is sustaining, where “walking into the woods was / the empty street; our love in the waiting / room”?

Yet for all the playfulness in Vizsolyi’s poems, the love he writes for is that long term kind, filled with commitments and doubts and constant renewals, I would venture to say Vizsolyi’s sonnet cycle actually provides the tradition a welcome 21st century update, at least in that sonnet strain of the enthusiastic lover. And I’m not just talking about a 21st century, metrosexualish male who is honest about looking at women wearing tank tops in spring and keeping his pubic area trimmed. These poems are the story of an early 20′s male who falls in love, relishes that love, proposes co-habitation with that love, then lives with love. Reading these, you get the feeling they are personal poems, and they chronicle the very real evolution of a love Vizsolyi is living through, a fact which adds some extra sharpness to the joy, and maybe an extra wet blanket when it comes to the last section.

Poor love. It never knew what it was in for when Vizsolyi took on the assignment. Love is careful and kind and it can make you feel like complete and utter crap. And so these poems in pursuit of love are camouflaged in that ungrammatics that is now a mainstay in contemporary American poetics. Only a fool would consider measuring out love, like with a yardstick or a stopwatch, especially when love is always making you think you’re starting again like it was brand new. Like that love from before is so two words ago.

Love is bounty. And lovely to relish. And surreal. And apparently it’s what it feels like when love is at the tip of your tongue. The Lamp with Wings is a celebration, an apology, and a healthily problematized succor.

Related Posts:

• Incarnadine by Mary Szybist
• Murder Ballad by Jane Springer
• Rise in the Fall by Ana Božičević
• Desolation: Souvenir by Paul Hoover
• Forty-One Jane Doe’s by Carrie Olivia Adams