The Kingdom of Ordinary Time: Poems
W. W. Norton, 2008

 

 

The Kingdom of Ordinary Time by Marie Howe

poems

After the Movie

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?

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reviews

"A cycle of heartbreaking poems about motherhood, called 'Life of Mary', looks back on the speaker's own dead mother, while other poems look straight into the moment, joyfully, reverently and always with a pause for reflection and amazement, with her daughter. Howe is a careful and soulful alchemist. She makes metaphor matter and material metaphysical. She becomes magic with her transforming perspective that is part mother, part muscle, part music, part mind. This book has the amazing thing that Howe always seems to pull off: the miracle. I saw it. / It was the thing and spirit both: the real / world: evident, invisible."
Starred Review, Publishers Weekly, Brenda Shaughnessy

 
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