Mary Meriam writes of broken families and relationships.
I wasn’t quite prepared for Then Flew My Caw Away: Poems, the recently published collection by Mary Meriam. Many of the poems are about broken families or broken or lost relationships. They’re filled with a sharpness, a toughness, words wielded like a heavy blade. But every so often, something else breaks through, and it’s so tangible you can almost taste it.
That something is pain. In “Heron,” the collection’s first poem, she writes, “I need to live another way,/ somewhere, maybe Oakland, / leave my old broken oak tree / feels like my only friend.” Several of the poems suggest a mother figure who, intentionally or not, dominated the child. The words often ache. They don’t ask for pity; they simply seek to understand and explain.
Meriam tries to remember what was and what might have been real, but what seems clear is that mother-child roles were reversed. And there was tension. “Once I tore the lightning and sent it seething / past my o=mother. I was a witch forgiving / no one, barely present, in love with no one. / I was her daughter… / I was her victim.”
Meriam writes with rawness, lines carefully honed and shaped. The patterns from childhood cannot help but affect adult relationships, and many of the poem are about loss, loss despite a yearning. Even when she turns to nature for solace, the sense of loss is there.
Wild
The slightest sound I caught was in the weather.
The woodwork of the birds has been the weather.
Cat’s ears turn sideways capturing a chirp,
a rustle in dead leaves, the din of weather.
Wild sounds bounce skyward off the waveless lake,
a picture of a shook-up tin of weather.
I’m never going home again, I swear.
Who can I contemplate as kin? The weather.
You ask for thunder. Yes, I give you thunder.
This raindrop for a gift, a pin of weather.
Then dimmer and dimmer down the dusk descends,
the margins merit one quick fin of weather.
Mary Meriam
Meriam received her B.A. degree from Bennington College and an MFA degree from Columbia University. She’s published nine poetry collections and chapbooks, founded the online journal Lavender Review, which publishes lesbian poetry and art, and co-founded Headmistress Press. Her poems have been published in anthologies ad literary journals such as Literary Matters, Poetry, Post Road, Rattle, and The Poetry Review, among many others. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Arkansas – Monticello.
I wasn’t prepared for the pain, and the loneliness, of Then Flew My Caw Away. Meriam writes with a precision that’s often remarkable. There’s no great mystery here; what you see is what you get, and the poems can be unexpected, surprising, and unsettling. And yet, in a way, they are also universal:; they express a human hope for love and acceptance. “Why don’t you walk away / from me right now. I mean to say, please stay, / I couldn’t bear to live without your breeze. / The heat’s unbearable, so cool me, please.”
Photo by Amy Aletheia Cahill, 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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