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A Memento Sent by the World

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Twelve out of thirteen poems in the final section of Marianna Hofer's A Memento Sent by the World use the words "iridescent" and "shimmer." There's "the iridescent shimmer / that's the thought / of a sunrise"; "the iridescent love / she wears, a shimmer / under the dinner lights"; "Lights in the next / town come on at dusk, / their shimmer iridescent"--and so forth. Every one of these last thirteen poems luck out by featuring a waitress who works at an all-night diner. It is one of those greasy spoons so much a part of the disappearing American scene that Hofer's depictions of the eatery, as well as its waitress, take on the aura of souvenirs or, well, mementos in a landscape scarred by McDonald's. But if an iridescent shimmer pervades her pre-fast-food poems, they in no way reek of pre-Raphaelite Sweet `n Low. On the contrary, Hofer's waitress is "Left on her Own [at] 4 A.M.; she "Sweeps up [Dead] Bees; she offers not a blue-light but a "Heartbreak Special."

No martini maiden from Manhattan, Hofer has come a long way from her early recollections of sitting on her dad's lap as he drove a semi-truck. A diehard denizen of flyover land, she has done plenty of trucking on her own--and come smack up against the dead-end streets of failed love affairs. The fact that she has experienced the Midwest's peculiar brand of solitude and isolation doesn't make her leap and shimmer with iridescent élan. The poems in Memento are acres away from such ecstatic paeans to the hinterland as Robert Bly's Silence in the Snowy Fields and James Wright's The Branch Will Not Break--though Hofer at one point quotes lines from Wright's "A Blessing." Nonetheless, Hofer's prosy narratives and meditations exult in rural and small-town moments of transcendence.

Nocturnal, insomniac, often using the second-person ("you") viewpoint, with several gloomy titles like "This Is Not a Story of Grace or Salvation" and "A History of Infatuations and Bad Intentions," Hofer's poems also let us know that "The Morning Paper Can Save Lives," that "Apricots Grow Best in Temperate Climates," and that we can "Say, for Example, `I Love You'" and be aware that "the streetlights hang / like pearls against / the throat of the dark / street just ahead."

Street-smart as it is, Hofer's wonderfully creaky barn of a debut poetry book makes its very own joyful noise unto the wind.