Mary Szybist’s newest collection of poetry, Incarnadine, is a meditation on not only the annunciation of Mary, but the ways in which the large and unknowable rubs up against the everyday.
Duccio’s Annunciation sits open on my desk. The slender angel (dark, green-tipped wings folded behind him) reaches his right hand towards the girl; a vase of lilies sits behind them. But the white dots above the vase don’t look like lilies. They look like the bits of puffed rice scattered under my desk. They look like the white fleck at the top of the painting that means both spirit and bird. –from “Entrances and Exits”
Szybist does not confine her words to a singular form.
Prose poems sprawl across the page, “It is Pretty to Think” is verse in the form of a diagrammed sentence, and “Annunciation with Erasure” speaks through the negative space as much as the positive. The variety in the collection can be unnerving, but the accessibility of the poems counteracts the severe shifting of gears between forms.
Szybist does a wonderful job illuminating the space between Mary’s outstretched hand and the hand of Gabriel. She gives the space words.
Walking away from Incarnadine, I couldn’t help but wonder at the lingering power of one pronouncement. If that annunciation were to be made today, in the same way, would we even notice?
The Lushness of It
It’s not that the octopus wouldn’t love you–
not that it wouldn’t reach for you
with each of its tapering arms.
You’d be as good as anyone, I think,
to an octopus. But the creatures of the sea,
like the sea, don’t think
about themselves, or you. Keep on floating there,
cradled, unable to burn. Abandon
yourself to the sway, the ruffled eddies, abandon
your heavy legs to the floating meadows
of seaweed and feel
the bloom of phytoplankton, spindrift, sea
spray, barnacles. In the dark benthic realm, the slippery nekton
glide over the abyssal plains and as you float you can feel
that upwelling of cold, deep water touch
the skin stretched over
your spine. No, it’s not that the octopus
wouldn’t love you. If it touched,
it it tasted you, each of its three
hears would turn red.
Will theologians of any confession refute me?
Not the bluecap salmon. Not its dotted head.
Magic lurks behind every line–after all, what is more fantastic than a virgin giving birth, saints that can smell sin, angels swooping through windows to visit a woman stirring a pot at the kitchen stove?
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