The Marvelous Bones of Time: Excavations and Explanations

by Brenda Coultas

Incorporating memoir, folktales, fact, and hearsay into two distinctly moving poems, this collection attests to history’s manifestation in the present moment. Beginning in the author’s Indiana hometown, not far from the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln, and along the Kentucky border where “looking from the free state / there is a river then a slave state,” Brenda Coultas uncovers a land still troubled by the specter of slavery. In the second section, Coultas investigates tales of UFO sightings, legendary monsters, and poltergeists, exploring the very nature of narrative truth through the lens of the ghost story. Brenda Coultas is the author of A Handmade Museum , winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award.

Genres: Poetry

140 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2007

Reviews

[Fabian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just like those subjects she attempts to capture--namely ghosts--the structure for this compilation of 2 poems is loose, somewhat disembodied, and as it evades classification, truly ethereal. All the research that went into the project finds a place in Book 2 (Book I deals with the poet’s tracing of ancestral roots):

rough crazy quilt I thought to loosen it all, to pull the thread/ let the rags fall
[“In a Gaze” 56])

I found it odd that the narrative prose of this section was scant with adjectives and poetic descriptions--stripped away of those conventions, the anecdotes of ghost and U.F.O. sightings take on a journalistic style (indeed, the only traces of poetry include calling on of other “poets” to give their accounts [Is a poet much more likely to be clairvoyant?]) and also the inclusion of “ghost stories” which are actually not: of stalkers and cockroaches, of cadavers, meth addicts and monsters of urban legend lore all of this is intended to produce a scattered effect of found objects. The bridge between Book I and II, traces of history in Kentucky and Indiana and modern ghost/legend huntin’, and it begins with this surmounting sense of investigation. For that very reason the book is subtitled: Excavations and Explanations; too, the addition of photographs (“A Sequence of Events” 122) and of lists (“Some Nouns in My Possession” 138) and even a section of film script (“The Shed” 87) gives the reader a sense of the poet’s insistent permeability and the innate curiosity for remnants when everything else seems, like time, transitory: “Secondhand Stories” are mixed in with the reader’s (and poet’s) own sense of the paranormal.

Many emblems of American history are dispersed throughout, mostly in Book I, to anchor the poet to her history. Yellow school bus (18), steam- and flatboats (20), abolitionist’s farm (25), Emancipation Proclamation (27), haystack…cotton fields (32) all have special significances in Americana. It is very fitting that the “history” part of the book comes first and the future comes later. (Is history, or the act of collecting historical artifacts, really an endeavor for the future? In this, her "hope chest", Brenda Coultas seems to think so.) There is guilt for being rooted so to the barbarism and holocaust of black slavery and the Civil War but also the poet’s obsession of looking for lost things. Coultas wants a reconciliation between the ghosts of the past and those of the present; in the introduction to Book II “A Lonely Cemetery”, the poet’s ego finally finds its way into this investigation:

I asked the cards if my poem would be successful. The readers said, “Who is that man with the dark glasses and pot belly? Is there any reason why I should be seeing Allen Ginsberg over your shoulder?” (68)

Taking into consideration the fact that Coultas is a poet who surrounds herself with fellow poets--all this adds gravity to the central query. I find the analogy of painters studying gamma rays similar.

B. Coultas’ thesis? It's found snug and beautifully midway through the book:

I dreamed of so many treasures buried in the earth or of just bones, all the bones buried by time, nature, or natives. Given eternity, we could find marvelous bones. (88)

[Fred · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marvelous.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really wonderful admixture of skepticism and credulity, of humor and searchingness

[Pamela · Rating 4 out of 5]

I reviewed this book for Galatea Resurrects. Check it out.

[Carrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this book might stay with me forever. Abolitionism, slave states and free states vs the supernatural. A sort of dichotomy simultaneous with a layering/synthesis of dichotomies.

[Sylvia · Rating 2 out of 5]

i think that even though i was not all crazy about this book, i learned something else about prose and poetry: everything fits in it if you dare to.

[James Grinwis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Awesome ghosts!

[Marjorie Jensen]

I read this amazing book for my U.C. Berkeley teaching assistantship, and gave a short presentation in class on tarot and poetry inspired by Coultas' lines on the topic, such as: "I asked the cards if my poem would be successful. The reader said, 'Who is that man with the dark glasses and pot belly? Is there any reason why I should be seeing Allen Ginsberg over your shoulder?'"