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toniclark's review
5.0
Mid Evil, Maryann Corbett’s third poetry collection, is the winner of the Richard Wilbur Poetry Award. It’s a beautiful book from the cover (featuring Portrait of a Young Girl, 1470, by Petrus Christus) to the rich, creamy paper and very pleasing Baskerville typeface (in not too small a point!).
I commented on Corbett’s 2012 collection, Breath Control, that the author is a master of received forms and turns them, with seeming ease, to her own purpose, lending grace and dignity to her subjects. This also true of Mid Evil. Read these poems and see how it’s done.
The book is divided into six sections: Scripts, The Nature of Things, A Chronicle in Fragments, Ad Feminam (which contains several of my favorites), Fables, and Sing, My Tongue. The poems are wise, worldly, at once scholarly and beautifully crafted, yet down to earth. Corbett’s language is formal, but fresh, and above all, metrically precise. You can tell that she’s taken pains with every line. Many of these poems are in received forms, both classical and modern: Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, sonnets, ballades, terza rima, the blues, the trenta-sei (invented by John Ciardi), and the double exposure (invented by Greg Williamson).
The title poem recounts an experience of teaching “Intro to Lit. of the Middle Ages” to a class of bored undergrads and is addressed, I think, to one young man in particular,
You, who are always painfully there,
hard at work ignoring the four-stress line
and the notes of Sumer is icumen in.
You make a point of filling classroom space,
near horizontal, legs stretched front, head back. . . .
. . . And the last blow is this, your final exam
in which, over and over, you call the course
mid evil literature. Yes, I suppose
for you that is the word. We are both lost here,
mapless in the Middle Earth and muddling through.
There are so many poems I could cite here, so many that I'd like to copy out. A couple of my personal favorites are “Resurrection Blues” and “Foundation Myth,” both of which are in the Ad Feminam section.
“Resurrection Blues” begins:
The racks at Goodwill, they're packed with wedding dresses.
Salvation Army, stacked with those sad white dresses.
Old dreams dropped at the curb. Post-breakup messes.
I’m tempted to post the whole thing, but you can read it at Kin Poetry.
And “Foundation Myth” begins:
No one explained, when you were seventeen,
that fashion magazines were early training
for future trials, evils unforeseen.
(But then, you never listened to explaining.)
Transfixed, you lingered in the drugstore aisles
before the altars of the magazines
where mythic beings modeled brights and pales,
mattes, iridescents, pinks, aquamarines.
No darkness, ever. Hair did not turn steely.
None told how it grows tortuous, wizen-wired,
nor how the ridges of the aging nail
must be rubbed out. But still the myths conspired
to school you. . . .
Read the rest here at Mezzo Cammin.
There are poems about forces of nature, musings and cautions, aging and mortality, what it takes for us to have come this far, what it will take to go on. But many are about the mundane, the events of day to day. I think the use of meter and form makes us see things anew; they provide a structure that that confers significance on our daily preoccupations. (I'm hearing Blake: "Everything that lives is holy.") This poet sees life, in all its complexity and variety, as worthy of all the praise we can summon. All the breath we can summon — which sometimes seems not enough.
In the last poem in the book, the speaker longs for a reprieve from breathlessness, for more breath, and celebrates,
The breath that Is. The sound of something there
guiding the gusty round of birth and death.
The rush of driving wind. The tongues of fire.
Corbett considers a wide range of subjects from the simple to the profound, often with subtle wit, always with that great generosity of spirit that is her hallmark.
I commented on Corbett’s 2012 collection, Breath Control, that the author is a master of received forms and turns them, with seeming ease, to her own purpose, lending grace and dignity to her subjects. This also true of Mid Evil. Read these poems and see how it’s done.
The book is divided into six sections: Scripts, The Nature of Things, A Chronicle in Fragments, Ad Feminam (which contains several of my favorites), Fables, and Sing, My Tongue. The poems are wise, worldly, at once scholarly and beautifully crafted, yet down to earth. Corbett’s language is formal, but fresh, and above all, metrically precise. You can tell that she’s taken pains with every line. Many of these poems are in received forms, both classical and modern: Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, sonnets, ballades, terza rima, the blues, the trenta-sei (invented by John Ciardi), and the double exposure (invented by Greg Williamson).
The title poem recounts an experience of teaching “Intro to Lit. of the Middle Ages” to a class of bored undergrads and is addressed, I think, to one young man in particular,
You, who are always painfully there,
hard at work ignoring the four-stress line
and the notes of Sumer is icumen in.
You make a point of filling classroom space,
near horizontal, legs stretched front, head back. . . .
. . . And the last blow is this, your final exam
in which, over and over, you call the course
mid evil literature. Yes, I suppose
for you that is the word. We are both lost here,
mapless in the Middle Earth and muddling through.
There are so many poems I could cite here, so many that I'd like to copy out. A couple of my personal favorites are “Resurrection Blues” and “Foundation Myth,” both of which are in the Ad Feminam section.
“Resurrection Blues” begins:
The racks at Goodwill, they're packed with wedding dresses.
Salvation Army, stacked with those sad white dresses.
Old dreams dropped at the curb. Post-breakup messes.
I’m tempted to post the whole thing, but you can read it at Kin Poetry.
And “Foundation Myth” begins:
No one explained, when you were seventeen,
that fashion magazines were early training
for future trials, evils unforeseen.
(But then, you never listened to explaining.)
Transfixed, you lingered in the drugstore aisles
before the altars of the magazines
where mythic beings modeled brights and pales,
mattes, iridescents, pinks, aquamarines.
No darkness, ever. Hair did not turn steely.
None told how it grows tortuous, wizen-wired,
nor how the ridges of the aging nail
must be rubbed out. But still the myths conspired
to school you. . . .
Read the rest here at Mezzo Cammin.
There are poems about forces of nature, musings and cautions, aging and mortality, what it takes for us to have come this far, what it will take to go on. But many are about the mundane, the events of day to day. I think the use of meter and form makes us see things anew; they provide a structure that that confers significance on our daily preoccupations. (I'm hearing Blake: "Everything that lives is holy.") This poet sees life, in all its complexity and variety, as worthy of all the praise we can summon. All the breath we can summon — which sometimes seems not enough.
In the last poem in the book, the speaker longs for a reprieve from breathlessness, for more breath, and celebrates,
The breath that Is. The sound of something there
guiding the gusty round of birth and death.
The rush of driving wind. The tongues of fire.
Corbett considers a wide range of subjects from the simple to the profound, often with subtle wit, always with that great generosity of spirit that is her hallmark.
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