Customer Reviews

A Secret Room in Fall

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A Secret Room in Fall by Maria Terrone is wonderfully rich with In This Moment poetry. In Omega Train, passengers stampede through subway cars attempting to escape a gunman. When they reach the front car there is, of course, nowhere else to go. What is about to happen? Where is the experience taking the narrator? Just here:

"What I remember/are the plastic turquoise seats,/how hard, ugly,/and oddly bright they were,/built for human cargo,/and how they would outlast us all."

This gritty epiphany sounds and feels so true! In moments of high drama, what do we remember or focus on? Often it's the small, the insignificant, and unsightly details that simultaneously make up and mar our environment. Then perhaps we notice one thing more. In Terrone's case, she realizes that those seats will outlast us all.

What are we to make of that? Endurance has nothing to do with aesthetic beauty? What, then, does endurance have to do with? These are the kinds of questions that good poetry brings up in us over and over again.

"For Blanche, Who Named the Colors" is a poem that gives us part of that answer. If places endure, so do people.

Praise Blanche, who lived alone
in a ground-floor flat
but dwelled in kingdoms

of Venetian Marble and Antique Pearl.
Pondering colors
for the paint company,
she discovered each one's soul

and gave them their names
when we might say
rose is just rose or
these shades are all the same.

Praise Blanche, who retreated
behind Cubicle Gray for days
to meditate on lilac till we feared
a plunge into monochrome

when she emerged,
face flushed, her voice was a bell
extolling Silver Chalice!
First Light! Ice Ballet!

each shade a stand
against sorrow and pain,
the void of no-names,
even when the tongue quavered

and came to rest, remembering
someone in palest Lauren's Lace.

This is a lovely poem! Perhaps I think so because an early job of mine was as an apprentice housepainter. Often I pondered paint chips with befuddled and bedazzled customers, and like them I sometimes wondered, `who comes up with these names'? Thanks to Maria Terrone, now I know! Blanche joins my pantheon of characters who have come alive for me in poems and so enlivened me.

A Secret Room in Fall is rich with such experiences. If you would like to gain considerable insight into the nature of endurance, if you'd like to perceive 9/11 and its aftermath in a different way, get this book. Experience it, enjoy it, and send copies to your loved ones!

-----Robert McDowell, The Poetry Mentor, author of the forthcoming Poetry as Spiritual Practice (July 15, 2008 from Free Press/Simon & Schuster), [...]

I was so moved by Maria Terrone's first volume of poetry that I was surprised to find myself even more affected by her second. This is a must read for anyone interested in modern poetry. Her imagery is so vivid and so eloquent that her work is a joy to savor.

Maria Terrone hears whispers of mythical import in kitchens, subway cars and Boombox Lotharios. She deciphers their signs amid urban landscapes. Maria is an alchemist of Urban Magic.
This second book of her poems, A Secret Room In Fall, is a distilation of sights seen and imagined. You will be transported to unfamiliar regions in your everyday world.
Rena