Customer Reviews

Dark Alphabet (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry)

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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."

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.