Customer Reviews

Ivory Cradle (APR Honickman 1st Book Award)

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The ivory cradle of this 44-poem collection draws associations of the moon on the book's beautiful cover, the manger, a beehive, a cluster of stars, and the "half shell of an egg" (p. 78). "The wonders here are those of perception, intuition, union, separation--and all emotions these provoke," Robert Creeley observes in his Introduction to Macari's book, "anger, despair, but also joy, love in its flooding recognitions, relief in the world's insistent substance" (p. xi)--or as Macari writes, "a bit of bread each day" (p. 59). Her poems are about desire, birth, death, growth, family, and riding "out the loneliness of love" (p. 65) from a failed marriage.

"I can torture him with honey," Macari writes in one poem, "I can be bread" (p. 40). These are the poems of a woman in all her phases, completely engaged in life. "I go after the TV with a shotgun, burying it without prayers" (p. 79). Macari's CRADLE is filled with imagery that keeps it endlessly rocking, page after page. In the opening poem, "Jesus of Cracow" (my favorite), she describes "a sky so heavy it hurt, ready to open in the next few hours and soak the city" (p. 5). (Because of this poem, I will never think of pigeons in the same way.) In another poem, "For the Moment," the sky becomes "a hive throwing out yellow bees" (p. 43). In "Vermont Trees," Macari describes "pine cones like bells, whole mountainsides of them ringing from their green steeples" (p. 35).

After reading Macari's book for the first time, I immediately read it again. Her first collection of poetry shows true talent, and I'll be on the waiting list for Macari's next book of poems.

G. Merritt

Ivory Cradle speaks about the cycles we live and know but cannot speak into words because of our own lack. Macari opens herself up and exposes the hidden things of her darkness, leading the reader to the hope that always exists even when the beehive won't survive. The book is a birthing of history, of womanhood, of poetics. Once finished, it would not sit on its shelf and behave. It kept finding itself into my hands until I read it again and again to make sure it was real. And the images of trees, the room, a young girl preaching sing still.

This is a beautifully articulated personal journey. It unfolds through questions of faith and history, intense anger, unleashed passion and untimate redemption through the transforming power of art. Poetry frees the soul; it soars high above its earthly limitations and finds it anchor point somewhere out in the universe. This an exceptional book, a good find, a readers delight. Anne Marie Macari bares her soul and offers the reader purity of line, verses that will remain in the mind long after one finishes the last page.