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Eva-Mary
"I lean into my own loving/touch, for which no wound/is too ugly,' Linda McCarriston says at the end of 'Healing the Mare,' one of the many poems of extraordinary poignancy and power in Eva-Mary.
Finalist, 1991 National Book Award for PoetryWinner, Terrence Des Pres Prize for Poetry
Finalist, 1991 National Book Award for PoetryWinner, Terrence Des Pres Prize for Poetry
- GenresPoetry
176 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
April 21, 2020
A lot of these poems were really heavy and the subject matter was sometimes hard to get through, but this collection is such a beautiful testament to healing. McCarriston's use of poetry as processing, as catharsis, is so impactful, and the choice to share her pain with her readers pulls you into a silent agreement with her. Never have I felt like an author is trusting me more.
I think my favourite poem was "Healing the Mare." I keep coming back to it, and reread it multiple times while I was going through the collection. I read a few of these poems each morning after waking up, and I'd be thinking about them for the rest of the day.
I think my favourite poem was "Healing the Mare." I keep coming back to it, and reread it multiple times while I was going through the collection. I read a few of these poems each morning after waking up, and I'd be thinking about them for the rest of the day.
July 31, 2021
I randomly picked this poetry collection up from a used book store for 3 dollars a couple of years ago. I only just got to it and it is easily one of the best collections I have read. Personal, moving, heartbreaking and beautiful all at once, McCarriston writes about the sexual and physical abuse, her mother and her endured at the hands of her father, their resilience, her brothers fear, and her love of animals and nature. At times difficult to read, this collection packs a punch. I definitely want to check out more of McCarriston's work if ever given the chance.
November 13, 2012
“According to Linda McCarriston, poetry exists for reasons beyond displays of linguistic or lyrical talent. It can address institutions of public power. It can serve as grounds for intellectual inquiry.” In McCarriston’s role as professor at the University of Alaska–Anchorage’s low-residency MFA program in creative writing, she encourages students “to consider poetry’s role as public speech.”
(interview in TriQuarterly, http://triquarterly.org/interviews/li...)
Eva-Mary is a powerful collection of confessional poetry, public speech at its finest. People frequently cringe when they see the word “confessional.” McCarriston does not rant and rave, the poems do not show even a tinge of self-pity; they are honest and brave in the details they reveal. She addresses interpersonal violence, incest, and childhood trauma openly and explicitly, demonstrating the power of poetry to witness and chronicle the imbalance of relationships.
These poems also reveal the pain caused by silence, as other adults in the speaker’s life fail to protect her.
I told
the priest in confession, the priest Father Welch,
who came to watch the Sox and drink iced tea.
He told me to mind my father.
(Grateful)
The second poem in the collection is an exquisite snapshot of how our judicial system dealt with domestic violence in the 1940s and 50s.
Your Honor, when my mother stood
before you, with her routine
domestic plea, after weeks
of waiting for speech to return
to her body, with her homemade
forties hairdo, her face purple still
under pancake,
(To Judge Faolain, Dead Long Enough: A Summons)
“Dismantling the Castle” reads like a curse to an abusive father. It starts:
May all of your children be writers,
or makers of movies, or sculptors
and continues:
May they write your stories
for you, as you told them to their flesh,
Abuse tends to be generational, a way of life handed down through families. The collection begins and ends with the same poem, perhaps signifying the speaker’s refusal to continue the cycle. In “Hotel Nights with My Mother,” she talks about, as a new teacher, observing her students for signs of what she endured.
I was watching them all
for the dark-circled eyes,
yesterday’s crumpled costume, the marks
In an interview with Bill Moyers, McCarriston says “poetry allows the individual experience to strike like lightning through the collective institutional consciousness and to plumb the depths of actual communal experience so that what people don't want said in fact gets said, and in a way that is unignorable.”
http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/tra...
The poems in this collection strike like lightning. McCarriston speaks the unspeakable in a voice that allows the anger and pain to come through, as well as the possibility of survival. Readers without similar personal history are equally engaged, as we are all part of a global community.
(interview in TriQuarterly, http://triquarterly.org/interviews/li...)
Eva-Mary is a powerful collection of confessional poetry, public speech at its finest. People frequently cringe when they see the word “confessional.” McCarriston does not rant and rave, the poems do not show even a tinge of self-pity; they are honest and brave in the details they reveal. She addresses interpersonal violence, incest, and childhood trauma openly and explicitly, demonstrating the power of poetry to witness and chronicle the imbalance of relationships.
These poems also reveal the pain caused by silence, as other adults in the speaker’s life fail to protect her.
I told
the priest in confession, the priest Father Welch,
who came to watch the Sox and drink iced tea.
He told me to mind my father.
(Grateful)
The second poem in the collection is an exquisite snapshot of how our judicial system dealt with domestic violence in the 1940s and 50s.
Your Honor, when my mother stood
before you, with her routine
domestic plea, after weeks
of waiting for speech to return
to her body, with her homemade
forties hairdo, her face purple still
under pancake,
(To Judge Faolain, Dead Long Enough: A Summons)
“Dismantling the Castle” reads like a curse to an abusive father. It starts:
May all of your children be writers,
or makers of movies, or sculptors
and continues:
May they write your stories
for you, as you told them to their flesh,
Abuse tends to be generational, a way of life handed down through families. The collection begins and ends with the same poem, perhaps signifying the speaker’s refusal to continue the cycle. In “Hotel Nights with My Mother,” she talks about, as a new teacher, observing her students for signs of what she endured.
I was watching them all
for the dark-circled eyes,
yesterday’s crumpled costume, the marks
In an interview with Bill Moyers, McCarriston says “poetry allows the individual experience to strike like lightning through the collective institutional consciousness and to plumb the depths of actual communal experience so that what people don't want said in fact gets said, and in a way that is unignorable.”
http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/tra...
The poems in this collection strike like lightning. McCarriston speaks the unspeakable in a voice that allows the anger and pain to come through, as well as the possibility of survival. Readers without similar personal history are equally engaged, as we are all part of a global community.
December 7, 2011
How could I not have read this book before? Breathtaking, full of ache and pain and compassion for the pain-inflictors without losing the sharpness of calling-them-into-account. I wouldn't say the collection is an "unflinching record of surviving domestic abuse" because you can feel the flinch as you read, every single flinch. Her "Healing the Mare" is essential: "I lean into my own loving/ touch, for which no wound/ is too ugly." Many love poems to her weary mother, many poems speaking to the healing of caring for horses. How resilient her inner light is.
Two poems really stood out:
"Lilacs" about a husband and wife fighting beside the browning lilac bush:
"we speak from those places
in ourselves that no one will ever
enter--stones found by ourselves
on the beaches of ourselves,
the tokens we credit with getting us
this far."
And the last lines:
"The gaps between us close a little
as we turn, our arms around each other,
and enter the cool interior."
And "Answer," a fierce poem addressed to the poet Louise Bogan, spoken in the voice of the woman "you saw, Louise/ Bogan, hanging clothes on the line/ from the cold back porch/ of her tenement, the woman you said/ you'd trade to be" -- well, I must just type it here for you:
I am the woman you saw, Louise
Bogan, hanging clothes on the line
from the cold back porch
of her tenement, the woman you said
you'd trade to be--free as she seemed
from where you stood at your barred
asylum window. But did your whole
mind ache to be out, to be only
whole enough that day to sort whites
from darks, to man the wringer,
to be that mechanical thing not singing
as she chapped her pale hands raw
in the city wind? Today I went
through the motions that woman
knew, motions I'd guessed
you'd spent your life refusing,
a waking day when my body or my mind
--I can't tell which--dragged
the other from room to room, wiping
fingerprints, washing the bowl,
polishing faucets. It is all I did.
How many have they been, the days like this
when at the end I could stop and thank God watch
the sun finally falling and say again
I didn't give in. I got up and
stayed up and the wash got done and I moved
a whole day closer to the end. Yours
are the poems I want to write but I can't
lie down and be cared for, can't ever crack,
and I hate her, the thick char who
will not fall, that deadweight peasant
who can't be plowed over, plowed under
to crumble and turn in the earth
of her pain into something that flowers.
I believed it when I read it,
but now I don't believe you ever meant
to be her, mere her, mere me, you proud
raku vase whose self preferred to shatter
time and again than to plod
the slack back porches and call it alive.
Two poems really stood out:
"Lilacs" about a husband and wife fighting beside the browning lilac bush:
"we speak from those places
in ourselves that no one will ever
enter--stones found by ourselves
on the beaches of ourselves,
the tokens we credit with getting us
this far."
And the last lines:
"The gaps between us close a little
as we turn, our arms around each other,
and enter the cool interior."
And "Answer," a fierce poem addressed to the poet Louise Bogan, spoken in the voice of the woman "you saw, Louise/ Bogan, hanging clothes on the line/ from the cold back porch/ of her tenement, the woman you said/ you'd trade to be" -- well, I must just type it here for you:
I am the woman you saw, Louise
Bogan, hanging clothes on the line
from the cold back porch
of her tenement, the woman you said
you'd trade to be--free as she seemed
from where you stood at your barred
asylum window. But did your whole
mind ache to be out, to be only
whole enough that day to sort whites
from darks, to man the wringer,
to be that mechanical thing not singing
as she chapped her pale hands raw
in the city wind? Today I went
through the motions that woman
knew, motions I'd guessed
you'd spent your life refusing,
a waking day when my body or my mind
--I can't tell which--dragged
the other from room to room, wiping
fingerprints, washing the bowl,
polishing faucets. It is all I did.
How many have they been, the days like this
when at the end I could stop and thank God watch
the sun finally falling and say again
I didn't give in. I got up and
stayed up and the wash got done and I moved
a whole day closer to the end. Yours
are the poems I want to write but I can't
lie down and be cared for, can't ever crack,
and I hate her, the thick char who
will not fall, that deadweight peasant
who can't be plowed over, plowed under
to crumble and turn in the earth
of her pain into something that flowers.
I believed it when I read it,
but now I don't believe you ever meant
to be her, mere her, mere me, you proud
raku vase whose self preferred to shatter
time and again than to plod
the slack back porches and call it alive.
October 9, 2009
Stunning. Though another adjective I'd use to describe McCarriston's poetry is "gut-wrenching." I don't understand why this writer's unflinching look at domestic violence and other abuse isn't more well-known, or, quite frankly, why she isn't as famous as other poets of her caliber (like Sharon Olds).
July 2, 2012
These are beautiful, sometimes painful, vivid, fully earned poems. That is, they bear the mark of the author's experience, plus imagination, plus lucid language. This is not abstract poetry you need five graduate degrees to decipher. This is brave, direct, fearless verse that packs a punch -- and sometimes a caress.
October 19, 2016
Quite a range, with some devastating poems about abuse and some of the most moving animal poems I've ever read. Poems about animals are difficult to write, and McCarriston nails beauty and healing while avoiding the sentimental.
February 4, 2008
Strength.
September 4, 2015
Excellent, moving book. Definitely recommend!
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews