Sherry Chandler

When I first started reading Marcia Hurlow’s collection Anomie (Custom Words, 2004), the words “reasoned discourse” kept popping into my head. Maybe it was titles like “The Archeologist’s Field Notes” or “The Historical Linguist’s Assistant Reports on the First Assignment.” Or passages like

Having fasted for three days,
I gather my documents and dictionaries
to track the history of hunger,
to trail the word’s etymology
and gather all the sloughed off
meanings…
— from “The Historical Linguist’s Assistant Reports on the First Assignment”

Not too many poets, I suppose, would like to have their poems accused of being “reasoned,” but Hurlow pulls it off, taking poems from these somewhat scholarly beginnings into a sort of terrible whimsy, in this case personifying hunger:

…Fearful, he cinches his thick
leather belt another notch, grasps
a dripping leg of mutton with his left
hand, slowly lifts it to his wide drooling
mouth, and bites, and disappears.

Hurlow is partial to a measured grammar — full sentences in a fairly long, slow line, a logical, often narrative, progression of ideas. At her best, she finds a subtle music in that sentence:

You know that our systems spiral down
to atoms, mirrors of cosmic shapes
awake in the coffee, the small prick of blood,
the air rushing down before the cold rain.
— from “Nuclear Romance”

She sometimes experiments with a shorter, faster line. Although the underlying sentence remains the same, this choppier construction makes a big difference in the way the eye comprehends the emotion of the poem. The lines have a panicked breathlessness:

She has eaten
so much loss now
that she grips

the thin realities
like the carved and sewn
grip the rails
of their hospital beds.
— from “Denial”

This collection is about loss, about the anomie of the title. If the two subjects of poetry are eros and thanatos, this collection gives us a hard-headed intellect confronting thanatos and finding comfort.

…Death
had seemed expected and welcome,
without paradise or brilliant
white light or a familiar
hand reached out to guide her in.
She felt grateful for an end, death
opening a simple passage for her.
— from “After the Emergency Operation”

Hurlow will be reading and signing at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning on February 9, 2006 at 6 pm with a workshop to follow at 7. Title of the workshop “Poetic Surprises: Breaking Expectations.” Cost: $25

This reading/workshop is part of the CCLL’s series New Books by Great Authors.