Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... Incarnadine: Poemsby Mary Szybist
Top Five Books of 2013 (454) Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Incarnadine truly made me feel creeped out at the idea of the annunciation (thankfully). Szybist has a way of communicating experiences that I (the male reader) could never be privy to and gathers the threads of history, theology, identity, and womanhood and creates such powerful poems as she threads them together. Welp, this was a set of poems that hit me right in my past as a medievalist who worked on Middle English mystics as well as someone who loves gorgeous language and experiments in form. I especially loved "Conversion Figure", "Hail", and "Update on Mary" though I think my favorite lines are in "Invitation" - "Angels of prostitution and rain/you of sheerness and sorrow/you who take nothing/breathe into me". I can think of at least one person I know who is also a poet who should read this immediately if she hasn't. Mary Szybist's second collection reaches for heaven through an imagining of the experience of Mary at Annunciation, and sometimes touches it with such lovely and simple language as: "Time to enter yourself. Time to make your own sorrow. Time to unbrighten and discard even your slenderness." "...having bathed carefully in the syllables of your name," "Now what seas, what meanings can I place in you?" There are times when the simplicity becomes merely prosaic and the collection is a bit uneven. Still and all, a worthy effort. Szybist presents an accessible collection of thirty-four cleverly constructed poems. Many of the poems are reflections on the Christian story of the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary that she is to bear the messiah, but the reflections are not always conventionally religious, many are sensual, a few carnal, two borrow quotes by public figures from public documents and build her text around them, and one redacts the gospel text to emphasize the awesome fear of the encounter. There is also a poem presented as a diagrammed sentence and one as a circular series of radiating lines as it appears on a ceiling mural in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. no reviews | add a review
AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
Mary Szybist restlessly seeks out places where meaning might take on new color. One poem is presented as a diagrammed sentence. Another is an abecedarium made of lines of dialogue spoken by girls overheard while assembling a puzzle. Several poems arrive as a series of Annunciations, while others purport to give an update on Mary, who must finish the dishes before she will open herself to God. One poem appears on the page as spokes radiating from a wheel, or as a sunburst, or as the cycle around which all times and all tenses are alive in this moment. Szybist's formal innovations are matched by her musical lines, by her poetry's insistence on singing as a lure toward the unknowable. Inside these poems is a deep yearning -- for love, motherhood, the will to see things as they are and to speak. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)811.6Literature English (North America) American poetry 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
But! This collection is named for a series of poems around the Annunciation, and "Conversion Figure" and "Annunciation in Play" I really liked. The first is told by the angel Gabriel: The shattering stars reflect the violently disruptive event that God taking on human form would be, and the clouds with no confetti foreshadow the humble birth, the dangerous life. Bearing the son of God would surely trigger a massive crisis of self-image, radically changing how you view yourself and your role in the world. In "Annunciation in Play", Szybist suggests Mary would, in self-defense, try to delay this encounter that would necessitate such hard work: But the girl knows she cannot put off this meeting with God's angel for long. It's a touching poem of the hesitation, fear, reluctance we can imagine Mary would have felt, about to lose her current sense of self and idealized life, in the moments before she replied, "be it unto me according to thy word." ( )