Marvelous Things Overheard: Poems

by Ange Mlinko

A vibrant and eclectic collection from a stunningly mature young poet.

“The world—the time has come to say it, though the news will not be welcome to everyone—has no intention of abandoning enchantment altogether.” Roberto Calasso’s words in Literature and the Gods remind us that, in an age of reason, of mechanization, of alienation, of rote drudgery, we still seek out the transcendent, the marvelous. Ange Mlinko’s luminous fourth collection is both a journey toward and the space of that very enchantment.
Marvelous Things Overheard takes its title from a collection of ancient rumors about the lands of the Mediterranean. Mlinko, who lived at the American University of Beirut and traveled to Greece and Cyprus, has penned poems that seesaw between the life lived in those ancient and strife-torn places, and the life imagined through its literature: from The Greek Anthology to the Mu’allaqat. Throughout, Mlinko grapples with the passage of time on two levels: her own aging (alongside the growing up of her children) and the incontrovertible evidence of millennia of human habitation.
This is an assured and revealing collection, one that readers will want to seek refuge in again and again.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Hardcover

First published September 10, 2013

About the author

Ange Mlinko is an American poet. The author of four books of poetry, she is currently an associate professor in the English department at the University of Florida. She was the poetry editor for The Nation from 2013-2016.

Reviews

[Steven Critelli]

The ancient work, Marvelous Things Heard, though historically attributed to Aristotle, is generally considered an apocryphal text of remade myths and tall tales which were doubtlessly intended for readers steeped in a tradition of storytelling that straddled anecdote, superstition and religious belief and served to fascinate, inspire and teach. More importantly, the text tested the continued durability of the fabulous and the fantastic against the background of analytical Greek thought that was seeing its sun rise over Western civilization. In this cultural womb the grand narratives of human progress and freedom were born. Yet, in the wake of post-modernism, Jean-François Lyotard posited that the age of grand narratives was over, for these stories could no longer speak universally given our essentially diverse orientations, perspectives, desires and needs. Instead, Lyotard believed we had entered the age of micronarratives and that those stories would now sustain us.

In this vein, Ange Mlinko’s new book of poetry, Marvelous Things Overheard, reinterprets our modern experience by way of micronarratives using poetry’s familiar lens of myth, fable, and anecdote, overlaying the received “truth” of the electronic media, local gossip and family history. The psychological perspective, one that Mlinko surely sees as uniting us with ancients, discloses an unsettling arrhythmia at the heart of our existence in the modern world. Where the people of the ancient world invented myth and religion to comfort and reassure themselves of a measure of understanding, especially where injustice and cruelty were regular features of life in the uncivilized world, and thereby sought relief from life's uncertainties through ritual and worship, when the unknown and unexpected rear up in a modern world of science and information glut, it is a cause for unease and doubt in our collective ability to assert with any confidence that good will prevail and that our future will be better than the past.

The first poem in this volume, “The Grind,” which was published in Poetry [] in September 2012 is a microcosm encapsulating this overriding thematic concept.

Three mini ciabattini for breakfast
where demand for persnickety bread
is small, hence its expense, hence my steadfast
recalculation of my overhead,

which soars, and as you might expect
the ciabattini stand in for my fantasy
of myself in a sea-limned prospect,
on a terrace, with a lemon tree...

Not: Assessed a fee for rent sent a day late.
Not: Fines accrued for a lost library book.
Better never lose track of the date.
Oversleep, and you’re on the hook.

The myth of our divine origins succumbs to the devil in the details that overwhelm us. The demands of modern life waste the soul and deprive the individual of a nurturing environment. “It’s life ground down to recurrence. /It’s fewer books read for the thinking. . .” Rebilled hospital bills, missing homework, and dog grooming expenses that displace one’s own personal care, these are the hair shirts of our daily existence. Sooner or later the phalanx of family and cultural values begins to crumble and other, more ominous forces begin to build within, a Grimm fairytale, where they create a replacement mythos for the good old-fashioned “potatoes and plain living” we were reared on and thought sufficient.

When I turn my hand mill, I think of the dowager
who ground gems on ham for her guests;
the queen who ground out two cups of flour
on the pregnant abdomen of her husband’s mistress;

I think of a “great rock-eating bird”
grinding out a sandy beach,
the foam said to be particulate matter
of minute crustaceans, each

brilliantly spooning up Aphrodite
to Greek porticoes, and our potatoes,
and plain living which might be
shaken by infinitesimal tattoos.

Full review at http://rockcru.wordpress.com/2013/10/...

[Queer]

Delightful poetry. Excellent and intriguing use of allusion and repetition. Accessible but not trite.

[sprout]

inaccessible and overwrought

[Leonard]

I loved the title of this collection but found the poems awkward and inaccessible. Maybe it requires more than one reading.

[Paul Scott]

Marvelous Things Overheard is a bit more linear, a bit less oblique, than Starred Wire, more in New Yorker territory. I thought of the New Yorker particularly as I was reading "Bliss Street," a poem that juxtaposes the relative privilege and security of Mlinko's current circumstances with the hazards and precariousness of her grandmother's circumstances growing up in eastern Europe--a graceful, lucid, subtle poem, but, you know, well-behaved--and sure enough, it was published in the New Yorker.

Rather like Paul Muldoon, though, Mlinko is not so domesticated as to never flash a streak of anarchy. "Wingandecoia" reminded me often of Muldoon with its audacious (near-)rhyming ("camera/emerald," "emerges/emeritus"), its gleeful rewiring of the villanelle, and its tragicomic handling of the founding and disappearance of the Roanoke Colony.

The volume's other long poem, "Cantata for Lynette Roberts," about a Welsh poet who is only beginning to be rediscovered, was the book's highlight, I thought. Both that poem and "Wingandecoia" demonstrated that Mlinko has a deft and confident touch with the architecture of a long poem.

[John]

I found the mythology aspects to be difficult to decipher. Mlinko is an effective poet in the use of rhyme — very innovative — which makes the poems interesting and adventurous. I would have preferred stand alone type poems, rather than some overarching theme that attempts to tie one to the other.

[Candice Schneider]

I gave it the good old college try. But for me personally, I just don't think I get poetry. Or I need to read it not like it's a book. The last poem in the book, "Reason, Love, Control" was probably my favorite though.

[Jess Dolby]

Stirring linguistic proficiency.

[Audrey Smyczek]

I felt slightly unqualified to read this. I’m sure most of the meaning went over my head.
I enjoyed picking parts that had meaning to me.

[Reed]

I found this difficult to read, with obscure geographic and historic references.

[Sarah]

Not for me.