The Kingdom of Ordinary Time: Poems

The Kingdom of Ordinary Time: Poems

An anticipated new volume from Marie Howe whose “poetry is luminous, intense, eloquent, rooted in abundant inner life” (Stanley Kunitz). Hurrying through errands, attending a dying mother, helping her own child down the playground slide, the speaker in these poems wonders: what is the difference between the self and the soul? The secular and the sacred? Where is the kingdom of heaven? And how does one live in Ordinary Time―during those periods that are not apparently miraculous? The speaker in Howe’s pleasant, somewhat scattered new collection of poems is a woman of around 50 trolling the supermarket aisles, going to movies, parenting her daughter, doing a spot of reading here and there—living, in short, an ordinary life and wondering what it means. At times there’s a hint of dread it might not mean anything, or at least nothing beyond its surfaces. More often, there’s a quiet determination to detect, define, describe what’s significant in an existence that might seem largely mundane. Still, she doesn’t find much. Howe’s is not a poetry of transcendence, grounded instead in the muck of the stubbornly material. Even its occasional approaches to religious themes—including “Easter,” in which the poet imagines Jesus’ spirit reinhabiting his formerly dead body, and a sequence called “Poems from the Life of Mary”—are strikingly free of metaphysical trappings. What’s left is a gentle sifting, an eye avid for the glint of gold, and a resignation that it might never come. --Kevin Nance Marie Howe is the former poet laureate of New York. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets, she teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City.