The poems of Mary Brown use words like a surgeon’s scalpel
To read Call It Mist: Poems by Mary E. Brown is to enter a world where words – razor-sharp words – reign supreme. Brown moves through landscapes, relationships, and ideas with a subtle precision and focus. There’s no ambiguity here; Brown’s poems suggest life is short, so let’s get right to the point.
I’m not sure why these poems kept reminding me of surgeons working in an operating room. Perhaps the careful, anything-but-subtle language made me think of a scalpel.
Her use of language is consistent; no word is wasted or gratuitous. Her landscape isn’t so much barren as it is sharply defined and etched. And the subject of the poem doesn’t matter; Brown subjects them all to a fine description or interpretation.
And the subjects vary widely. They include boredom in a small town, having cabin fever, assessing one’s being at midlife, historical subjects, receiving visits from a coyote, backache, sidewalks, a carved coffee table, advice from a wedding prophet, different kinds of cold, and more. Brown brings precision to each, knowing what she wants to say,. And she says it in the fewest words possible so that her meaning is clear.
Three of the poems are ekphrastic, inspired by other works of art. One is based on a book; the other two on paintings, including this one by Vincent Van Gogh. The poem begins with a simple explanation of the painting and then ends in something more personal.
Wheatfield with Crows
after Vincent Van Gogh
He lays my bones on canvas, plays
the angles. The long ones he strokes
into stalks of wheat, the ribs
into ruts and hillocks.
He ticks the short into storm.
I ride the rust of the road,
glim the green as it plows through.
My pale eyes mismatch in the sky.
Then the crows tip in:
the troubles of heaven on the wing.
They do not consider the scare in me—
carved into cobalt, lucid in gold.
One could die happily here.
Mary E. Brown
Brown previously published Drought, which won the Claudia Emerson Poetry Chapbook Award. She received a B.A. degree from Connecticut College and an MFA degree from Antioch College. Her poems have been published in such literary journals and anthologies as Blackbird, Blast Furnace Press, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Comstock Review, Ekphrasis, The Pittsburgh Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner, among many others. She lives in California with her family.
I’m still thinking about scalpels, the surgeon’s tools that make very fine cuts to determine what’s underneath. That’s what Brown does in Call It Mist – she plumbs the depths of the outwardly obvious to see what’s below the surface.
Photo by Conall, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
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