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A review by lukenotjohn
The Kingdom of Ordinary Time by Marie Howe
4.25
I just read through this whole collection in one sitting, and while I don't know if that gave me enough time to really appreciate the weight of it all, I really loved it nonetheless. I didn't know what to expect from Howe and initially felt a bit thrown by her irreverence, I guess anticipating a more "spiritual" or "depthy" exploration of life. Of course, the very point of the book (and, one could argue, of the concept of ordinary time) is to deconstruct the boundaries between sacred and secular, "spiritual" and "irreverent." Interestingly, I think I've often read writers and poets infusing and naming the sacred within the secular, sort of elevating ordinary moments into ones of holiness with the heightened language one would expect, and many of these poems felt like an inverse, stripping things down and lowering them to an earthy accessibility.
These observations (and I'd say the collection as a whole) seem best exemplified by my two favorites. "Easter" is a brief poem reflecting on the straightforward reality of the resurrection moment that can be read as either comical or profound or both, and "Prayer" is an unblinking confession of her perpetual resistance to doing just that. In both, the reality of the sacred is undeniable in a way that's taken for granted, seemingly putting it just out reach, akin to the dusty mist of soul her Mary remembers seeing rise up in the also beautiful "Once or Twice or Three Times, I Saw Something."
I loved the aforementioned poems, and as a whole really enjoyed all of the ones written from Mary's perspective, but especially "Annunciation." I have to applaud Howe for writing in such a way that all airs of pretension that so often haunt contemporary poetry have been kept at bay without also writing so simply that the words are just boring (although a few here do read more like tiny vignettes of memoir or short story more than poetry, however that's defined). Instead, most of these are beautifully grounded, with their magic emphasized by how simultaneously ordinary they are (this is particularly true for "My Mother's Body," "Questions," and "Sometimes the Moon Sat in the Well at Night.")
These observations (and I'd say the collection as a whole) seem best exemplified by my two favorites. "Easter" is a brief poem reflecting on the straightforward reality of the resurrection moment that can be read as either comical or profound or both, and "Prayer" is an unblinking confession of her perpetual resistance to doing just that. In both, the reality of the sacred is undeniable in a way that's taken for granted, seemingly putting it just out reach, akin to the dusty mist of soul her Mary remembers seeing rise up in the also beautiful "Once or Twice or Three Times, I Saw Something."
I loved the aforementioned poems, and as a whole really enjoyed all of the ones written from Mary's perspective, but especially "Annunciation." I have to applaud Howe for writing in such a way that all airs of pretension that so often haunt contemporary poetry have been kept at bay without also writing so simply that the words are just boring (although a few here do read more like tiny vignettes of memoir or short story more than poetry, however that's defined). Instead, most of these are beautifully grounded, with their magic emphasized by how simultaneously ordinary they are (this is particularly true for "My Mother's Body," "Questions," and "Sometimes the Moon Sat in the Well at Night.")