In works whose subjects range from the religious to the carnal, the whimsical to the foreboding, Jennifer Maier’s debut collection of poems, Dark Alphabet, explores the everyday mysteries of our common experience with humor, lucidity, and an unblinking yet compassionate eye. Whether occasioned by a song overheard on the car radio, a packet of risqué postcards from the 1920's, a conversation with a dead parent, or the behavior of ducks in mating season, each poem sets off on a journey that ranges far from its origins, arriving with the reader in a clearing at dusk, in a place of wise good humor and somber grace.
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“Jennifer Maier's colloquial language settles you comfortably into the passenger seat for a journey full of surprising turns. The poems are triggered by ordinary events: a friend's asking why she doesn't write novels; the sight of ducks in mating season. Dark Alphabet is a sophisticated blend of wit, intellect, feeling and perception, as mysterious as nightfall and as fresh as daybreak.”—Madeline DeFrees, recipient of the Lenore Marshall/The Nation Prize for her selected poems, Blue Dusk
“Maier has written a first book that doesn’t read like one, replete as it is with the evidence of a mature craft and an established vision. What frequently comes into that vision is a patterned world: it might be twin ranks of live oaks whose top branches entangle over an avenue or the flurried shadows of crows on the wing or other glimpses of the naturally paradisiacal that frame the humanly fallen. While keeping the lives of people at the center of the design, Maier gets poems as easily from the willow pattern on China as from the template of myth she sees in what she sees. Signs appear to her, also, of the literal sort. Patterns in the form of words—on cardboard over a market-gardener’s truck, on a license plate frame, or in fortune cookies—can launch her into the spirited vernacular rendered in this alphabet. Dark alphabet, it may be, but the poems are unsolemn, leavened by wit and brightened by metaphor, even when the subject is loss.”—Jason Sommer, author of The Man Who Sleeps in My Office, Other People's Troubles, and Lifting the Stone
About the Author
The award-winning poet Jennifer Maier is an associate professor of English at Seattle Pacific University. She serves as an editor for the quarterly journal IMAGE. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, SWINK, The Mississippi Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Music of Words,
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This review is from: Dark Alphabet (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry) (Paperback)
Let's cut through the usual academic hoo-ha and highfalutin, lit-crit code-talking. This collection, Maier's first, is just plain gorgeous. Packed with wit, burning with passion, personal as a late-night conversation, these elegantly crafted, far-ranging, accessible poems will make you laugh, ponder, catch your breath,and yes--cry, more than once (mind, this is an Alaskan ex-hunting guide talking). There's some sort of alchemy at work in Maier's poetic voice, something you can't quite put your finger on. But if you read these poems aloud, you'll hear it for yourself: the music of words, each one a perfectly tuned wind chime, ringing in the dusk.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dark Alphabet by Jennifer Maier,
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This review is from: Dark Alphabet (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry) (Paperback)
Jennifer Maier is hilarious. The imagination at work behind the poetry in her first collection, Dark Alphabet, is voracious and supple. It expands the world from the tiniest points into a universe bright and dark with meaning. It yields sly-eyed, delightful images that burn in the mind long after the poem is gone. And, as a bonus, her imagination tickles and teases with the agility of a truly consummate poet. On moving on from an old love: "Will April lay down her xylophone / and pick up the cello? / Or December go gravely in his mourning coat / without his white gloves, his diamond tiara?" And the poet's answer to a friend who asks why she is not a novelist: "although / I have combed the Gulf Coast towns / of my childhood, seeking the snowy egrets / of great short fiction, it is only the poetry birds / who land on me." Maier possesses the sort of wit that steals the familiar object out from under your nose, rendering it to you again, either inside out or in a different color, say, chartreuse. It's then, with a jolt of recognition, that you see what has been overlooked: the lake as a "murmuring woman" under the moon, like the woman oppressed by the memory of her drowned son but kept from falling through the earth by the atoms that "push back / bound in their electric need." Or the earnestness of the young undergraduate asking her professor if she believes in soul mates, her "eyes two sharpened spades / turning the loam of her future." These poems move nimbly between the commonplace and the resonant, fired by the poet's deep reverence for language and a fascination with the way our minds enter our own experience and that of others, often through unexpected doors: a hymn to a saint, a cherry cordial given to a child by a black-sheep uncle, the thread of a cashmere sweater winding through the lives of generations of women. Compassion, stripped of sentimentality, moves behind each word, giving flight to Maier's poetry birds that form "a dark alphabet against the sky."
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Frank O'Hara Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Surprise Me!
Frank O'Hara Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Surprise Me!
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