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Mary Falls: Requiem for Mrs. Surratt

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Fine writers are not unlike magicians: They toil long and hard behind the scenes, practicing and honing their slight-of-hand, until it seems to the audience that dazzling tricks are performed effortlessly and with an almost childlike simplicity. I suspect that MARY FALLS: REQUIEM FOR MRS. SURRATT developed in much the same way for magician Christopher Conlon. The sequence of 44 poems that comprise this narrative were surely assembled with great care, research, time and technical skill, but the net result - an examination in poetry of the life and death of Mary Surratt - glides off the page with an almost spontaneous vigor, as if Mr. Conlon were composing it in real time.

Much as he did in GILBERT AND GARBO IN LOVE: A ROMANCE IN POEMS and THE WEEPING TIME: ELEGY IN THREE VOICES, Conlon uses a mix of reality and fantasy to tell the story of a historical figure. He skillfully blends a character's public life and documented biography with imagined thoughts, dreams, hopes and eccentricities, blurring the line between fiction and fact so well that each protagonist seems to have allowed the author to draw on some lost, private diary. These inner lives are not haphazardly guessed at; they evolve as Conlon uses a character's actions to extrapolate their psychological make-up.

The author proved the formula when he essayed the lives of a famous silent screen couple in GILBERT AND GARBO, and perfected it in THE WEEPING TIME, where he dramatized, in personal terms, the largest slave auction in American history. He continues the tradition here, bravely highlighting one of the more obscure figures of the Civil War era: Mary Surratt, a conventional, seemingly apolitical woman caught up in a vortex of history and ultimately hanged as a co-conspirator in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

Conlon succeeds in telling Surratt's story without resorting to leaden exposition, and allows the real-life drama to play out from Surratt's passionate, somewhat ignorant point-of-view. His poetry is as evocative as his short fiction, taking the reader into other times and places and people with stark clarity.

One would assume that a historical epic would suffer from the brevity required of poetry, but MARY FALLS flourishes in the format. Conlon achieves this by treating Lincoln's assassination as a skeletal framework upon which Mary's life is stretched like diaphanous lace. Using this structure, Conlon reminds us that the people who made history were, first and foremost, just people, with all the myriad weaknesses that humanity is required to endure.