Grace, Fallen from

by Marianne Boruch

In her wry and riveting new collection, Marianne Boruch discovers things often taken for granted and holds them up to deceptively casual light, questioning them both mercilessly and mercifully. Employing a masterly range of tone and form, Boruch makes a sometimes strange but always revealing investigation of world and self, history and memory, resistance and release. Here a woman levitates behind a door as her daughter badly bangs out Mozart. Here God is caught before the moment of creation, before knowledge, before "the invention/ of the question too, the way all/ at heart are rhetorical, each leaf/ suddenly wedded to its shade." It's here raucous boys on their bikes are told--through telepathy--don't go to this war. Here, that a Dutch still life is returned to the small chaos of its making. And Eve, in "stained fascination," stares down the snake of the lost garden. The lyric impulse in these deeply interior poems stops time, even as the world, indifferent to its mystery, keeps happening.

Praise for Marianne
"Her poems are complex rather than simple rooms ... they bring the world's strangeness, and their own, home to whatever reader is open to old mysteries, both in dreams and in the waking life they illuminate."--Philip Booth, The Georgia Review

"Marianne Boruch's (work) has the wonderful, commanding power of true She sees and considers with intensity. Her poems often give fresh examples of how rare and thrilling it can be to notice."--Robert Pinsky, Book World, The Washington Post

"Every detail of image and syntax shines with multiplicity."--Donald Revell, The Ohio Review

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2008

About the author

Marianne Boruch is an American poet. She graduated from the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1979, and after teaching at Tunghai University in Taiwan, and at the University of Maine at Farmington, went on to develop the MFA program in creative writing at Purdue University and was its director until 2005. She has taught there since 1987 as well as at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Apodeictic indexes the verbal trick of conjuring an incontestable area between demonstrated and demonstrable, and it's a verbal modality Marianne Boruch finds again and again in Grace, Fallen From. "What God knew when he knew nothing. A leaf | looks like this, doesn't it?" There seem to be at least three areas of exploration here: love, the describable world, and the self, the body as a locus and palimpsest of those three tableau. In an aubade, Boruch will write "I read the roof next door. I read | the shingles, their stony | overlap. . ." The narrator here would show us the attention the childhood self devoted to a scene she only darkly understood, shown to her through the "brown glass" of a grandmother with small-town attitude. That attitude she tropes as a "shrug," and the poem ends memorably, with "Anyway, my husband | said this morning, throwing back | the sheet." That same attitude is admired a few pages on: In "Lunch," at a zoo, the speaker imagines an occasion for this shrug in one who feeds the animals, "his trusty | indifference, his alright-another-day-of-it | shrug and off-key whistle." It's the husband's masculine shrug, again, and it's love that is the "hopeful" off-key whistle. One sees the author's own conviction in her love for the world in these "roofs" that are read, however they're read, right. "[S]ecret | whoever she was" as the author puts it in another poem. The self's attributes precede its authenticity and mark it. So it's possible to be emptied by publicly witnessing, as does "Hello"'s speaker, a stranger's revealing something salacious on a cellphone; one hurries to be out of a context that marks expression in its modality of privacy. Boruch would inventory our civilizing instruments and a certain civilization/primitive binary gathers around in the lexical pockets of many of the poems, a human witness there looking at photos, paintings, Italy's churches, listening to Glenn Gould, it is a life of a certain profile, with a certain vagueness, or is it happiness? Is it love or is it self-love? The answer is: both.

[Patricia Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's such a privilege to read a poet from the beginning, and I have so enjoyed the arc of Borush's work.

The second: melt. The third: I need to freeze first.

I can love humankind. I can do that.

Anyway, my husband said this morning, throwing back the sheet.

When you go anywhere, you bring yourself.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Boruch’s readers benefit from her limitless curiosity and questioning nature. Her approach to gently crack things open to see inside and understand only leads to further query, but she firmly believes (or perhaps just can’t NOT do it), that by posing a series of unfolding questions, one learns, about the object or creature at hand, and more importantly about the nature of humans through time and now, those who surround us and love us and the one who looks back in the mirror. In a word, Boruch is philosophical. I had the pleasure of hearing her read recently, and her voice suits her: it is low and pleasing and somewhat hard to hear, such that you must listen closely. She is interested in the nature of things and memory and it’s no wonder questions riddle her poems. In the poem Still Life, she asks “And that rabbit skull—whose idea was that?”

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a cranky old soul lately, aren't I?

I really liked the intelligence behind these poems, but some of them I felt like went on a little too long, were a touch bloodless for me. I think someone on Amazon said these are good poems by Boruch isn't doing anything here that she hasn't done before, and maybe I felt the same way, that there's an element of comfort, and an sense of the poems' beauty being almost perfunctory.

They are beautiful, and there's a lot here I really like. It just lacked that spark of discovering something new, something mindblowingly needed to be shared.

Which doesn't mean that I don't think there's a ton here to study and admire and think about. It's just not very immediate.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this as an inter-library loan, and had to give it back before I could read it a second time, but it was good enough that I wanted to read it a second time. These poems deserve more attention.

[Bonnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best poets writing today.