Love Song for the Dying
Heaven Beneath: Poems by Anne Marie Macari. Persea Books, 2020. 88 pages. $15.95.
Anne Marie Macari’s fifth poetry collection begins with the epigraph:
Oh Matchless Earth, We
Underrate the
Chance to
Dwell in Thee
Macari chose the lines from an Emily Dickinson letter to create a spare but ardent entry into her Heaven Beneath: Poems. This address to the imperiled Earth and its inhabitants reads as both ode and elegy. The first poem “Atlantic” lives in that tension between encounter and loss in the moment the speaker and her father are visited by a breaching whale. We see the“[s]pace animal in a shroud of baleen,” emerging, '“then staying as long as / a creature can” before diving, becoming “irretrievable.” The poet shows us the speaker looking into the eyes of her father and the whale, both unfathomable, both seen and lost.
Throughout this book, Macari keeps upholding the loss inherent within any presence. Instead of retreat, the poet insists on staying, on being-with, whether with a dissected grosbeak in “Hummingbird Bones” (“all the beings pinned to boards, I think / of bird-ghosts swooping around”). or standing in swirling tidal muck, or beside a father receding into dementia. The poet remains, distance-less, immersed in the bafflement of living.
Many of Macari’s poems take their titles from Shaker hymns; see “Down in the Lowly Vale,” “I Hunger and Thirst,” and “I Feel the Need of a Deeper Baptism” for a glimpse of the spiritual longing they denote. Macari does not imitate the hymns, but something of their lean and foursquare beauty emerges. In “I Looked and Lo a Lamb ,” Macari moves from the Christological lamb of the hymn to a cloud in the shape of a lamb. By then, showing the reader a flesh and wool lamb “teasing the grass with its mouth,” she has rescued the creature by showing it to be, finally, itself. Without pause (there is Emily’s dash!) the poet demands,“from where does happiness come?” though by now we know.
Macari keeps pulling us down with her into the world: “I come to the tree, / and fall though // the roots.” This communion is not always easy or safe. Here, in the poem “Who Will Bow and Bend like the Willow,” she warns “[w]ho will survive // must bow and bend.” This attitude requires the opposite of our current anthropocentric dominion. The baptism Macari seeks happens not in church but at the shoreline, or (in “I feel the Need of a Deeper Baptism”), in greater depth:
Along the seed floor, inside
the humus, carcasses
of small animals decay, microbes
dine — I want to return
to the vault of wilderness
we stumbled on…
It is through this humility that redemption is found. Like waves of pain and relief, the reader is led from encounter to danger to loss to praise—though every moment of praise is limned with the specter of loss. The speaker becomes prophet, witnessing the shrinking “no longer Ever[glades],” passes through drought and fire, and witnesses the “Strangler Fig,” bereft “[w]ithout fig wasps, there’s no / pollination, no fruit, / without the fig’s flowers the wasps / can’t reproduce.” With mankind decentered but connected, Macari warns and keens,
To survive means others will not
But the ice?
The blue ice and its calves?
Using the Shaker-like, boiled-down intensity of language to describe her mud-bound communion with the earth, Macari shows us how to praise a dying world: “I am mixed with what I love.”