Nick Ripatrazone enjoys the latest collection of poems by Maryann Corbett both entertaining and devotional.
Tucked in the back of a book, an author’s biographical note is often perfunctory and formulaic. Yet poets, to borrow a sentiment from Robert Frost, must be open to surprises. At the end of The O in the Air, we read: “Maryann Corbett earned a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota and expected to be teaching Beowulf and Chaucer and the history of the English language. Instead, she spent almost 35 years working for the Office of the Revisor of Statutes of the Minnesota legislature, helping attorneys to write plain English.”
Worth a chuckle, the note encapsulates Corbett’s wit. The O in the Air, her sixth book, is a work of a master at her craft. Corbett’s doctoral dissertation was on the first recension of the Northern Homily Collection, a cycle of verse sermons for the year, originally written in the early 14th century. Such critical inquiry is a rich furnace for a budding Catholic poet. In her own work, Corbett channels the anonymous Middle English poet’s desire to help open the Gospel for the laity. “Forthi tha Godspells that always / Er red in kirc on Sundays, / Opon Inglis wil ic undo, / Yef God wil gif me grace tharto”: the poet sought that priests of the time “undo” the challenging Latin verse into English to spread the word of God, while not lessening or neutering its original spirit. As Corbett explains, the cycle “was considered by some a work of narrative entertainment, by others a devotional work, and by still others a preacher’s tool”.
Corbett’s poetry, in its own modern way, is similarly entertaining, devotional, and homiletic: always profound, and often darkly comic. “Back Story”, the book’s first poem, is a wonderful framing for her book and her overall project. She considers a tradition in northern European art of a foregrounded landscape juxtaposed with a distant, nearly hidden detail from antiquity or the Bible. “Up front: the world and the flesh / So solid you think of stepping into the canvas / to the plowed ground, or hefting the armour’s weight. / Yet in the distance, a few brushstrokes of fable” – an image of Icarus, perhaps, or the apostle Peter – “freed by the angel” in Acts of the Apostles.
Once observed, these enticing details create a question, and a poetic admonition: “What strange spell are you under / that you go dazzled by life’s pure distraction / and daylight’s daze? Do not fall prey to the demon / who soothes you with the steadiness of fact.” Corbett concludes her poem with an arresting pair of inquiries: “What if the world you learned in flame and darkness / is apprehended only through these fancies? / What if the whole of it is heavenly?”
Her poem “Overture” arrives with a decidedly Catholic framing: the world is what it is, and yet graces abound. “Be praised, Lord”, for “propped-open windows” that offer “reassurance” during the “muggy meanness” of “mid-July”. In the adjacent yard, the narrator hears “high voices yammer”. Across the alley comes the “tantrum wail” from a “wild toddler”. Rather than escape the world, the narrator, still speaking to God, requests: “In this heat, wake us. // Send us street theatre” during the early morning hours. Others might escape the cacophonous sounds, “mum / in the iced quiet” of “their central air”, but the narrator suspects it is because of their “curtained sorrows”.
“Go back to sleep,” Corbett writes in a villanelle, “Circadian Lament, Sung to a Wakeful Baby”: “You’ve made a slight mistake / switching your days and nights around this way.” The poem recalls the melancholy wisdom of Gerard Manley Hopkins in “Spring and Fall”. “Though now you babble charmingly and play / the infant hours away (a light mistake), // there will be bitter medicines to take / some night. Take love: its wide-eyed thrills one day, / its clammy sweats the next. Take nights awake, // your soul in shreds, your bank account at stake.”
The poem ends with an admission that will be recognised by all parents: “There will be no escape from nights awake, // I warn you. And my wisdom doesn’t make / one whit of difference.”
Corbett speaks to God (“O Lord of the inverted verb”) in her poem “Prayer Concerning the New, More ‘Accurate’ Translation of Certain Prayers”. She seeks forgiveness for her “Job-like rant: / These prayers translated plumb-and-squarely / Pinch and constrict us.” She prays: “Hear us still if we mutter dully / With uninflected tongues and knees.”
In the masterful “Buying a Plot in Plague Time”, Corbett contemplates death through a prosaic purchase. “Shouldn’t the moment be more – well, dramatic? / Shouldn’t it toll like Donne’s dead-bell? But no,” she affirms. “Mere paper-rustling”. Nothing in large print or small, “addresses dread, or God”. The process weighs on her: “When until now has dying loomed so real / I shrank from my dead flesh?” She concludes the poem with a lament: papers signed and envelopes sealed, but “no one says Amen”.
A late poem in the book startles the reader with a visceral litany of bodies catalogued by “local crime reportage” and images from
“a grainy late-night documentary”: “Bullets, gurglings, screams, ominous music: / the screen supplies us everything but the odour.” The setting and tone are necessary. The speaker recalls the mystery of “when, after hours of sitting beside” her terminally ill mother, “hours of rosaries, psalms, calm classical radio”, that she “ducked into the hospice kitchen” for a bit to ease her starvation, and just then her mother, “with her usual undramatic methods / met God while I was paying no attention?” Corbett’s poems often end on questions: an affirmation that this God-haunted world is best experienced through wonder.
The O in the Air by Maryann Corbett (Franciscan University Press 2023)
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