Abstract
“Word Frequency Head Trip,” the final poem in Mary Ann Corbett’s new collection, The O in the Air, is a modest quatrain – two rhyming couplets with a swinging dactylic meter: Like is the yoke of a simile’s pair. God is the question, the O in the air. Now is not now is not now. But it was. End is the problem, since everything does.
In a collection filled with many poems of more complicated construction (villanelles, sapphics, sonnet crowns, fibs), this conclusion sounds as essential as a nursery rhyme, and the four words it highlights are thereby wormed into our ears: Like, God, Now, End. Are they indeed the words most frequently used in this volume, dominating the word cloud one might make by uploading the whole? If so, I would not be surprised – no “head trip” for me – though that may have been the author’s experience in making such a discovery. For as the ditty itself suggests, finding likenesses is the poet’s business, and the themes of belief, time, and death dominate this collection. That Corbett chose the evocative phrase “the O in the air” for the book’s title also alerts us that the whole collection aims to speak of the unspeakable, both directly and obliquely. What is the “O” in the air? Is it the “O” that we breathe – oxygen, suggesting the essential nature of the God question? Is it the “O” we often send into the air when we cast our desires and complaints heavenward? Could it even reference the unwritten vowel in G-d of the Jewish tradition – a clever verbal sleight which will prevent the erasure of the name? In any case, questions of faith, doubt, theodicy, and devotion infuse the air here, even when a poem’s subject is as earthbound as the closing of a 1950s era drive-in (“The Last Night at Porky’s”).
Of course, the mundane and the heavenly are mirrors, each reflecting the other – as the first poem of the collection (“Back Story”) suggests using two stanzas that mirror each other in their line-ending antonyms (a form Corbett attributes to A.E. Stallings). So for one thing, we’re alerted from the start that the devil – and God – are in the details of precisely deployed forms, words, images. What also hides in the distracting details of “real” life is that same essential figure: “The question. Always haunted by its answer: / What if the world you learned in flame and darkness / is apprehended only through these fancies? / What if the whole of it is heavenly?”
The first section of the book exhumes painful memories of a world “learned in flame and darkness.” Corbett’s previous collections have focused on other aspects of her life – her time as a writer and editor for the Minnesota legislature, for instance, provided a thematic coherence for In Code. And it may be pure projection, but having reached the stage myself where parents and even a sibling are gone, I feel a later-in-life urgency underpinning this section’s unpicking of the past. Now is the time when heirlooms pass into our hands, and we are the owners of the story. This is often especially true for women – the presumed caretakers for the beloved furniture, linens, and china of our families, and Corbett offers poignant poems here and later in the collection on these physical and emotional inheritances: “Ghazal for a Bottle of Shalimar, 1956,” “Lavoro all’uncinetto,” and “Responsorial Psalm for the Beneficiary of My Mother’s Will.” The shame of the child who once spilled the Shalimar persists as an ancient stain on the mother’s rosewood vanity that “broods” now in the speaker’s own bedroom. But like Seamus Heaney, taking up a tool not quite his father’s spade in “Digging,” Corbett honors her Italian grandmother’s needlework by taking up her pen to create “patterned beauty” in “this frill of sound, of air”; her highly wrought poems offer the kind of “constraints” she needs to fashion the art of “sad entanglements” that she will bequeath to the future (“Lavoro all’uncinetto”).
Here and elsewhere it is clear that the speaker’s parents had lives and secrets before her arrival that cast a mysterious darkness over her youth; for the child the poet calls into being here, the adult world is one of whispering and slammed doors (“Sorrowful Mysteries,” “Overture,” “Late Night Thoughts While Watching the History Channel”). One secret wound whose pain radiates through the collection is the fact that her mother’s first husband had abandoned her – before the speaker who discovers this truth was born into the second marriage. But that long-concealed hurt offers the key to many of the speaker’s own wounds, especially those that both 1950s and 1970s era Catholic worlds inflicted: her mother could not receive communion until a late-in-life annulment, her father stood outside the church through the masses of her childhood, her own wedding would not offer general communion. In a poem later in the collection the speaker at a mass that she likens playfully to a child’s party nevertheless admits “I’ve come to feel / how all my feasts are haunted – / some holy, wounded memory / hanging above the meal” (“As Little Children”). The magisterial long blank verse poem “Knowledge” reveals this crucial origin story and the poet’s lifetime work of piecing it together. Her poetry is perhaps the only place it can be told, as the poem itself ends with the speaker’s refusal to bring the tale into the post-Christmas gathering of family downstairs: “We’re just not storytellers, my daughter sighs. / I murmur, No. The rest I leave unspoken.” And as another poem concludes, this refusal to communicate can become generational. The speaker recalls: my twelve-year-old self, weeping on Sundays fifty years ago when my father drove us to Mass but stood outside, puffing his Chesterfields, doing what his father had done, and his father’s father before him, wordless to tell me why. (“Late Night Thoughts While Watching the History Channel”)
The distances between what we wish to say and can or should, the distances that arise between generations – these are themes more fully explored in the second section of the book. Even people in the same family experience the world differently – have varying perspectives on the landscape (“High”) or even the colors of things (“Differing Visions”). Sometimes we choose to reserve speech – as when we see the patterns we lived recur in our children’s lives (“Speak Memory, Or Not”) and sometimes we must try and try again to capture “those scenes / where beauty is married to fear” as in “October” – a poem to haunt any poet’s (and parent’s) heart in its yearning to find the right words for a mother and son’s liminal experience both “lovely” and heart-breaking. Another poem in this section that struck deeply: “Ice Dam” – where the figure of the snow’s accumulation on the roof – so apparently airy – is revealed of course as the weight of water (“Only now, in the first whispers of March, / does the truth dribble down the walls on the upstairs porch”). Now the damage appears – the clearing of the powdery weight that might have prevented it “was left undone.” To do the necessary work, “[s]omebody has to risk his life”; in this collection, the poet bravely takes up the dangerous task of tackling the ice dam of those generationally frozen secrets and unspeakable words.
The final section of the book includes several poems written in memoriam for other poets, a meditation on “Buying a Plot in Plague Time,” another poem on a pioneer and soldiers cemetery, accounts of a mother’s death in hospice, and a poem on choosing extravagant caskets for parents who had lived in a forced frugality all their lives. Sounds grim. And yet, there is a lightness at the end – a blending of high and low – a willingness to encounter the holy in those deaths and also in a bar tender’s skill with flaming drinks, the scent of college students’ backyard grilling, the mind-experiment (acknowledged as theological error) of seeing God as a “Terrible Two” not yet comprehending his calamitous brashness (“A Vision of Saint Polycarp, Martyr, as Bartender,” “Epinikion on Marshall Avenue,” “Apophatic”). There are still friends who will die of cancer (“Votive Offering”); the aftermath of the sexual abuse scandal that requires witness: “Blessed this emptying, its dust and crumble / the sackcloth of our humbling” (“Sacred Art & Architectural Salvage, Inc.).
And yet, the poet has perhaps come to a place of acceptance with the ways in which her family’s personal and religious narratives have shaped her life. The bookend to the first section’s “Knowledge,” its mirror, is the also-lengthy “Praying Sleepless.” Here, in hendecasyllabic stanzas, the poet rehearses all the things she knows from her inherited Catholic life about what prayer should be like, how it ought to be done, but also freely admits that her particular family story has impeded her ability to use some of the forms (“Yes, there’s the Gospel-certified Our Father – / but here be dragons if you knew my father . . .”). It is ultimately in the questions themselves – “Who are You, Lord? What do you want of me?” – and in a childlike resting in the simple prayer that comes to everyone’s lips most naturally, Hail Mary, that the speaker finds peace, sleep.
As formally accomplished as ever, this collection is Corbett’s most emotionally vulnerable and daringly personal book so far. The new Colosseum Books press that has published it aims for the “renewal of Catholic letters in our time,” and The O in the Air is one of its first publications – a wise choice. The work is a testament to the lived experience of a “cradle Catholic” both before, during, and after the Vatican II reforms. It does not romanticize a golden Catholic past, reveals years of spiritual struggle, and acknowledges the deep pain of the clergy sexual abuse scandals. The poet has an intellectual, confessional, and cultural patrimony that delights, sustains, and infuriates all at once. She accepts this inheritance, too, but she is honest in admitting that God is still the question that she breathes.
