Finding a God That Fits Reality

by Beth Kanell

It was almost too much to handle, the slim book in black cover with its extraordinarily erotic artwork. Gloryland , by Anne Marie Macari (Alice James Press, 2005), knifed into me with its first bold poem. And from then on, it was read one, swallow hard, gulp, wriggle, read another. I felt like a brook trout must, hooked over and over again, even if the anglers are playing “catch and release.” Something inside starts to bleeed.

            And in Gloryland , when something inside is bleeding, it's not usually the heart, but the womb: whether by moon cycle or by birth or even, astoundingly, her grandmother's abortion.

Macari, a New Jersey resident, brings her award-winning fire to New England twice a year, as core faculty for the low-residency MFA program at New England College. Noted author Tony Hoagland described her poems as “Sexual without needing to be seductive, spiritual without being sentimental, tough and full-bodied.” And although the poem is not the person, and the “I” in written work isn't literally the eye of the author, it's tempting to apply the same labels to the woman who has pounded out this work.

The opening poem is a shocker, a daring statement that the rest of the collection resonates against. Titled “Mary's Blood,” it opens with the assertion, “It was Mary's blood made him, her blood / sieved through meaty placenta to feed him, / grow him, though Luke wrote she was no more / than the cup he was planted in, a virgin / no man every pressed against or urged / who could barely catch eyes with the towering / angle but felt God come to her like light through glass, like a fingerprint left on glass.”

Following this bold statement, Macari spreads out a flood of fresh language, images of the child's head within the mother's womb rubbing from the inside against her cervix “like the round earth / rubbing the thin wall of the sky that holds it,” of birth that propels out “a child lit with her own gore,” of redefining the word mother as “to crack open, to be rent / by what comes to replace her.” And there is   a remarkable conclusion: After asserting again all that Mary's blood nourished in the uterine growth of the babe, Macari concludes, “she grew caul to wrap him and door / to come through and nothing, not even / crying Father, Father, to the warped / blue sky can change it.”

Here is the holiness of birth dressed in garments of reality. For though Macari is far from a confessional poet, she offers quick glimpses into her life as single parent, as survivor of a love that came undone, where she emerged from the darkness of abandonment with children still firmly fastened to her, body and soul. Marriage may well have grown as an institution as an attempt to be sure who fathers each child, for it's a biological truth that, barring DNA testing, the only absolutely certain parent is the woman from whose pelvis the baby squirms. This isn't new knowledge – but applying it to the birth of the Christ child, and to faith itself, erupts in both blood and light.

The movement from the faith of a religious childhood (Catholic in Macari's case, it seems; Jewish for her partner, the poet Gerald Stern) into grownup belief often takes pilgrims off harsh cliffs. For Macari, it's not a crawling or marching effort. It's wind and weather and “angels like cats of different / sizes with their fierce wings and purring” who will have to blow “some semblance of faith back to me.” And Heaven? A woman on a bus speaks to the poet, “In the next world / I won't have to carry anything.” Macari has a list of other reliefs she says she should have mentioned in reply, as her vision of “Gloryland.” Most of all, she hopes for and proclaims light, love, angels who laugh.

Early reviews of the collection emphasized the feminine aspects of the poems: the portrayals of Mary, of mother and grandmother, of birth. There's a remarkable poem called “Night Feeding” that evokes the surge of milk in the breasts, the exhaustion and possessiveness that rise together during a hungry baby's urgent attachment to his mother in the middle of the night.

But there are also tender paintings of men here. I love “New York, 1927,” in which two days of labor culminate in the birth of the tiny son who would be Macari's father some day. Her fiercely proud great-grandfather, father-in-law to the woman who has just produced this babe, calls in the men of the family and points at the sleeping, swaddled infant: “ Now, he told the men, / you work only for him.”

There are doors into and out of the body. There are soul passages and evidence of souls. Macari produces a rigorous, shining Godhead that's based squarely on the bloody realities of birth and mothering. Miracles assemble like golden pollen falling from ripe blossoms; the Madonna in a painting lowers herself nearly to the ground in order to whisper, “this is my body given to you” – followed by, “flies around / the unhatched eggs, dogs, a child crying.”   And love is something so plentiful and profligate that around a bed of lovers, jackals feast on the remainders of its succulence.

All this is a feast, especially just after the major religious holidays, when post-celebration letdown or disillusionment can run rampant like bunny rabbits carrying jellybean eggs (or matzoh, take your pick). My choice here for reading aloud to others is “Annunciation,” two pages of slanted coupled lines detailing a small son's explanation of how he came to be born (“He said he stood in a cloud and pointed at me”) and a mother's sense of her children and her love for them.

And finally, the one I'll copy out and post on my wall for feasting upon, over and over, is the last in the collection, “What Will You Feed Them?” It's a question to prepare for the end of an earth's rich life, “When the Complete comes to find me” and asks for a justification or proof of love. “I'll have water / hot on the stove, the tea / just right, I'll say I've sucked / the bread of this life / but I'm never full, I'll go / with my mouth open,” Macari proclaims, ending the final quatrain with a long dash.

This is her second book; the first was Ivory Cradle, a winner of the APR (American Poetry Review)/Honickman first book prize in 2000. It was worth the wait for this second serving. I look forward to the next.

Beth Kanell is co-owner of Kingdom Books, a poetry and mystery specialty shop in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont (www.KingdomBks.com).