Gloryland re-examines motherhood, death, birth, and rebirth, drawing on religious and secular creation myths to enact a feminist religion. Bold, rich lyrics reveal the grand in the domestic, claiming the physical as an essential part of the -female experience, declaring that to live fully in the body is the truest, bravest, and most glorious form of worship.
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From Publishers Weekly
In her sumptuously visceral second collection, Macari (Ivory Cradle) invites readers into a world alive with women, where every "you" and "she" is an echo of another "I." The effect is a fleet of voices insisting on the body as source of knowledge and experience-for "Who wants to be / anything but flesh"? Indeed, here flesh is freedom, made of startling doors and windows opening both outward and inward upon the "body beyond the body." As the collection builds, Mary, the quintessential virgin, makes her way to "the burned-down home of the whore," her frequent foil, seeking, it seems, a mutual exchange of secrets. In Macari's atmosphere, sense and movement are dreamlike and associative-"if I want to feel how the dead move," the speaker confides, "I should take up rowing." Indeed, while readers will be familiar with Macari's terrain-Christian myth, the revolving seasons, motherhood, death, the soup pot-her imagination creates uncanny encounters, where "clarity is the other side / of whatever I've tasted."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
“Ann Marie Macari’s powerful poems make poetic speech seem an utterly natural act. She is the latest ambassador of a great lineage of strong poets whose subject is blood-knowledge. Sexual without needing to be seductive, spiritual without being sentimental, tough and full-bodied, I like so very much the way the poems are always in hot pursuit of the serious mysteries (kinship, sex, mortality)—at once blind and deeply intelligent, pushing into the underbrush of knowing. Gloryland is a sensational collection.”—Tony Hoagland
"This is what poetry does for me when it opens the self and enters the deep places, the sea bottom where our lonely islands are connected. It gives joy." —Alicia Ostriker
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Feminine Strangeness,
By Remy Wilkins (Monroe, LA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Gloryland (Paperback)
It is no longer novel, and a bit banal, to talk about the number of female poets writing today, but of those that are published none convey, as does Anne Marie Macari, such a strong combination of femininity and strangeness that makes the female creature so mysterious and marvelous. Her sense of bodily otherness is refreshing when often sexuality has taken on a gender neutrality, such that it looks the same coming out of the mouth of a man or woman. The focus, rather than on physical commonalities, is on that distinct sensuality so foreign to men. But this nature -made alien to male readers, made felt by female- is then extended to all of humanity, "How we are all grown strange". She had made us all new and unfamiliar.
The Gloryland of the title is both an unseen paradise and the body lived in, and the book walks the boundary between them with a sacred searching and a mature eroticism: "the bed is a little church where/ we have given up and taken back, spoken/ in tongues, worshipped//and worshipped, then lapsed each night,/ into oblivion" and in the lines, "It had something to do with touch. He was/ my Moses, parting my sea of grief." If there is anything elegant, anything patient, wise and sexy left in the word "matronly" then I would use it here to describe Gloryland. There is faith and doubt, nature rides the numinous, her writing is an extension of experience, sure footed yet tentative. Had Emily Dickenson lived a more full life I would like to think it would be like Anne Marie Macari's.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Vibrant,
By
This review is from: Gloryland (Paperback)
(Anne Marie Macari read at the West Side YMCA on Friday, February 2, 2007, as part of the Writer's Voice Visiting Authors Series. This is from my introduction to the event).
In Gloryland, the magnificent book of poems from Anne Marie Macari, we see again and again the process of transformation, of leaving comfort or stasis to engage that which must become. This is the poetry of possibility encountering resistance--the limits of expression, of the flesh, the limits of a person's own emotional endurance. There is no passivity in these poems; Anne Marie makes clear the work, the hard toil both in real life and in the making of poetry necessary to get at something's essence, whether the ultra-sensation and pain of birth, or the deceptively simple acts of making soup or filling a vase. How each action we take, no matter how prosaic, connects us to something bigger, and conversely, can so readily focus us on the particularities of our own circumstances. Despite the struggles portrayed within, the poetry is pure joy; images on the page utterly fresh, and yet universal, like the moment portrayed could not have been described ever-otherwise. A duck dipping its head to feed, the ironing of a child's shirt connecting back to every hand that brought the item into being, the poem "Madonna Enthroned" ending with one page-long sentence, and at the conclusion the reader is transported, changed, vulnerable, open to all and any possibility. And these transportational moments happen all throughout. The poems in Gloryland are vibrantly alive, part dread and part wonder, like life, when looked at in its fullness. This is can't-look-away poetry, not like driving by an accident, but because each poem demands to be read, to be considered, whole.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Glorious book celebrating the glory of women,
This review is from: Gloryland (Paperback)
I loved this book! If I could express myself as well as the author, I hope I would be able to write as fabulous a book as this. The poems make me unexplicably weep and I don't know if it is from joy or sadness or exuburance.
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